


The Source of All Things

by Maldoror_Chant



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Eventual Threesome, Fantasy, Insanity of arcane origin, Kinda, M/M, Magic and Technology brawling and eventually screwing, Mathematical Magic, Mild description of self-harm, Multi, Plot Twists, Rough Sex, Science Fiction, The universe is a pile of marbles and other dubious allegories, alternative universe, crones - Freeform, faint masochism, fairly graphic depiction of sex, weird science
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-17
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2018-12-31 01:14:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 53
Words: 273,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12121344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maldoror_Chant/pseuds/Maldoror_Chant
Summary: Center, a planet where magic and technology blend. Or more accurately, fight tooth and nail. A planet of Sources, holes in our boring dimension letting through arcane power, chaos and pseudo-deities. In this hot-house of myths and very real dangers, Trowa and Quatre find a mysterious man at the end of a shamanic voyage. Portents suggest this Heero Yuy is crucial to Center’s survival. He’s important enough to have some interesting enemies after him, at any rate: a devious killer and thief called ‘Shinigami’, and a very irate Dragon. Beyond them looms an even greater threat. Indeed, the greatest of them all.(Alternative Universe, far-flung future sci-fi/fantasy. There are elements from the anime that exist here, albeit in very different forms; Gundam mechas, Zero, and lovely G-boys for instance. They are perhaps a universal constant we are not yet aware of.This fic was originally started over a decade ago. It has been heavily rewritten and should now be eventually finished)





	1. The Naked Man On The Rock

**Author's Note:**

> NOTE: Some of the G-boys, particularly Quatre and Duo, start out with personalities that are quite different than their canon counterparts. Circumstances are going to change them into something closer to the original. I mention this as they initially come off as pretty callow, which may be off-putting.
> 
> Established 3x4, eventual 2x5, even more eventual 1x2x5 (kinda)

Trowa was reaching blind. He could have grabbed on to just about anything; a bush, a rock, a rattlesnake... When hanging by two toe-holds and three fingernails from a cliff, a wise man worries not what his free hand grabs as long as it's firm and can keep him from becoming a big mess at the bottom of a ninety foot drop.

The top of ravine he'd climbed jutted out like a pouted lip over his head, half a dozen inches of jumbled rocks and outcropping over which he could only see a slice of sky. Reaching over it, his free hand brushed sand and loose grit. He was too out of breath to swear. His right forearm was threatening to cramp.

Then his fingers touched something. It was warm. Too soft to be one of the sun-scorched rocks of the ravine. Trowa patted it once, grabbed it and tugged - firm, quite firm. Well, whatever it was-

He released the hold of his aching right hand, relying on whatever was supporting his left. It shifted as he put more weight onto it, but not much. He scrambled and heaved his upper body up and over the slight overhang. Elbows dug into firm ground and the aching pressure on his feet subsided. He gasped with relief. Glanced up. Froze.

He was holding on to someone's ankle.

The man was looking at him blankly. He didn't seem ready to shake Trowa's hold, so, after a second of hesitation, the latter used it to finish hauling himself up.

He got to his feet slowly. Even his finely honed body had been tested by the climb. He shook blood back into his scratched and aching fingers as he examined the silent man. The stranger was right at the edge of the canyon, sitting on a rock as if he'd hardened from the same primal magma. His eyes were fixing Trowa without interest, his face-

No, to be honest, that was not what Trowa noticed first. What he noticed first -even when half of him was still dangling over the cliff- was that the man was naked. Completely naked, he confirmed, standing in front of him. Not that clothes -Trowa's eyes traveled up and down slowly- would have been necessary. In fact -Trowa leaned forward to get a better look, since the strange man didn't seem to mind his scrutiny - clothes would have been a damn shame. Trowa found himself wishing, for the first time in years, he still had both his eyes. The sacrifice of the left one had brought him wisdom and power, following in the footsteps of a truly ancient myth, and it did not hamper his abilities to fight or find his path. But damn, there were times when a man could regret binocular vision.

The stranger was giving him a blank look. His gaze was... not dull, but incurious. Which, considering the circumstances, was unusual.

"Aren't you going to ask me why I just spent two hours climbing down and then up the walls of a very steep canyon instead of using the bridge that's about a hundred feet from here?"

The handsome man continued to examine him with the same blank stare. Just as Trowa was wondering if the man could speak Common, or hear, or was able to comprehend, the blue eyes flickered to his left, to look at the elderly wooden bridge which was, indeed, a hundred feet away and perfectly serviceable, albeit weather-worn and in need of a good varnish. Then he looked back at Trowa.

Trowa waited.

The man looked at him as if he had the rest of eternity to stare up the shaman’s nostrils.

Trowa shook his head. He was not a talkative person; he let others trip over their words while he listened instead. But they'd be here till nightfall, or possibly the end of the world, if he didn't take the initiative in this particular case.

"I'm a Nightwalker, a shaman. I'm following a straight line."

He waited.

No question, no comment.

"I follow it until I find what I'm looking for. I've been walking all night."

Silence.

"The line is from the planet’s ley-lines, its spiritual core. You can only follow it if you have the Sight. I don't know what I'm looking for when I start out, but if I follow the line and do not deviate, sooner or later I will find it."

Still nothing.

Trowa leaned forward and put a finger in front of the stranger's face. He moved it left to right. The deep blue eyes followed it without curiosity or any trace of damage or paralysis. The bright sunshine and the fatigue made reading the lines of the man’s aura somewhat haphazard, but other than being way too smooth and calm for the circumstances, nothing jumped out at him there. The stranger seemed perfectly healthy, uninjured and, well, strange.

"Looks like I found it."

The man said nothing.

"My name is Trowa Barton."

Silence.

"And you are?"

Silence.

Trowa leaned forward, until he was roughly on level with the man’s face, and pressed his hand to his chest. “Trowa. Barton.”

The man gave Trowa a particularly hard stare, and then something smoothed in his face, in the lines of his body and his aura. He looked away slowly, straight ahead, out at the canyon and the arroyos of the badlands beyond.

"Heero Yuy."

Trowa felt some relief. He could speak, good.

“Now we’re getting somewhere.” He straightened. ”Your name is Heero Yuy. That doesn’t sound local.”

"No."

"Not surprising,” said Trowa, glancing around the dry arroyos. The planet of Center was a wonderful mix of the technological and the arcane, a sprawling world of a thousand cultures, a hundred flavors of religion and techno-cabalism, and a million stories. This particular bit of her, however, was dry as a bone and sparsely populated by a few monosyllabic ranchers, almost all of whom were named ‘Ted’. “I would have said-“

"That is not my name."

Trowa rubbed his sore shoulders and smiled every so slightly. He shook the hair, which sweat had plastered to his face, out of his good eye. Ah, a challenge.

"Heero Yuy. Doesn’t sound like any title I am familiar with. Would-“

"It means the one and only."

As Trowa digested the one small additional nugget of what might charitably be called information if one was truly starved for it, his eye kept running up and down the body before him. He found himself nodding. "Well, I'm already in a committed relationship, or I'd be tempted to take you up on that. Are you the one and only of anyone in particular?"

"No."

"Do you have a name?"

"No."

Trowa stared at the lines, widening the vision-eye as much as he could, whitened pupil centered on the stranger’s aura. The man’s lines hadn’t flickered. Didn’t have a name, didn’t need one, didn’t even know it was a thing, didn’t care either. Interesting fellow...

"Can I call you Heero Yuy then?"

Thundering silence.

"Do you want to come with me, Heero Yuy?"

The man said nothing. His eyes stayed nailed to the desert landscape, the cracked and burned earth, the Joshua trees and scrubs sweltering in the heat-waves of a morning sun as if they would catch fire before noon. Trowa hesitated, reached out and took his wrist. Heero Yuy cast an incurious eye at the hand holding him, and allowed himself to be pulled to his feet.

"Come on. If we leave now, we can make it back to my camp by early afternoon."

The man nodded -the first positive gesture he'd made- and headed towards the cliff. Trowa quickly grabbed his shoulders and swung him towards the left. "No, we don't need to go back that way, we can take the bridge."

"You are following a straight line."

"Only until I find what I was looking for, and I think I found it. Him. You. Come. Trust me, the bridge is a lot easier."

Trowa led the other to the bridge, occasionally glancing back to make sure Heero followed him, and also to admire. Heero walked without a hint of embarrassment, as if he'd never known clothes before. Trowa was intrigued, but also prosaic. Considering the uniformly pale smooth skin -with just a hint of gold tone- the man was going to be roasted by the sun before noon. His back was already reddened. Trowa dug his cape out of his backpack and persuaded Heero to put it on. He had to tie the fasteners himself. Heero followed the movement of his hands with something like watchfulness, then fell into step without a word as Trowa once more set out for camp and Quatre. The healer could tell Trowa if Heero Yuy was simply a confused mugging victim who'd been dumped naked in the desert, or something infinitely stranger.

 

 

Quatre's cries of pleasure suddenly strangled themselves into a squawk.

Trowa gasped as his lover went rigid in his arms. "What? Did I hurt you?"

Quatre just shrank further into his chest, as if trying to hide, his eyes fixed on a point past the shaman's shoulder.

Trowa sat back on his heels a bit more and turned his head. Heero, dressed in one of Trowa's spare outfits, was standing outlined by the last rays of sunset, a hand lifting the curtain hanging across the vardo's low doorway. He was staring at them.

"Heero? What is it?" They’d left him outside with Quatre’s stern injunction to rest, make an early night of it, get some sleep.

"You were screaming."

"No, that was Quatre." Supported in his arms, his lover curled even more onto himself with a groan, drawing his legs back from Trowa's waist as much as he could in the circumstances.

Heero frowned. Trowa waited a few seconds, but Heero didn't seem to want to ask anything, or leave. He just watched blankly as if social mores and prudery were as unknown to him as the power of levitation.

"We're having sex," Trowa said, although that would have been obvious to anyone including someone who had lost both eyes rather than the one. Quatre was always vocal.

"Sex." Heero's frown cleared slightly.

"Yes, sex. Do you want to join us?"

" _Trowa!_ " Quatre's voice was scandalized.

"Join you," Heero repeated, as if tasting the words.

"He didn't mean it, Heero, he was joking," Quatre said quickly, poking a red face past Trowa's shoulders. "He-"

Trowa noticed Quatre's eyes go wide, the color drain from his cheeks. He glanced back at Heero, who was looking at the rest of the vardo's interior. Then the strange man turned on his heels and left.

"What is it, love?"

Quatre’s eyes were troubled. "He wasn't interested at all."

"I'm hurt."

"I mean, at _all_. No sexual feelings at all. I've never... even a child would show some curiosity and embarrassment. He's just... not there... "

"You said he had no apparent brain damage."

"I think I should examine him again, he's not normal."

"I should say, anyone who wouldn't even consider joining us is highly-"

That earned him a punch on the shoulder.

Trowa smiled, shaking sweat-heavy bangs out of his one good eye so he could look at the man in his arms. Quatre was blushing again. This was his natural state when they made love. Even after all their time together, he was strangely shy about it. Trowa thought it was very arousing, but there wasn't actually anything about Quatre that he didn't find arousing so that wasn't saying much. Quatre could -and did- make stitching a blanket look alluring. Washing dishes, cutting wood, mixing medicine, drinking and eating, talking to merchants, arguing... there wasn't anything that Quatre could do that Trowa didn't like.

Except maybe try to wiggle away from him just when things were getting interesting, for the puny reason of some strange man poking his head into their caravan.

Trowa waited until Quatre had practically lifted himself off of his erection, then pulled on his hips and gently thrust him back on again.

Quatre gasped. "What-" He tried to get off again, a bit more vigorously this time. Trowa, on his knees and sitting back on his heels right at the edge of the bed, had been supporting Quatre’s entire weight as they’d moved together earlier. His legs looped over strong forearms and around Trowa’s waist, Quatre didn’t have any leverage on the bed, and he couldn’t reach far enough back to use the walls of the vardo, so he was left trying to climb up Trowa and shove off against his shoulders. Trowa waited once again until the last second, and plunged himself back into that welcoming warmth.

"Trowa!" Quatre hissed.

"Quatre," Trowa murmured, only slightly teasing as he nuzzled his lover’s ear.

Quatre started to wiggle again. "Let me go. He's still right outside!"

Trowa waited and then thrust once again. Quatre bit the shaman's shoulder, to stifle a cry, then harder, a small nip in anger. Then he automatically smoothed it over with his hand, a small wave of healing chasing away the barely-red mark on the skin.

"So what if he's outside?" Trowa sounded very reasonable. If Quatre had actually wanted to stop - to go check on their new charge right away for example - he’d have used his Serious Healer tone rather than a love bite, and they’d already be outside shining lights in Heero’s pupils.

"Trowa!" Quatre hissed, leveraging against his lover's shoulders to lift himself off of his erection again. "We can't- he's listening! Ah!"

Trowa's slight smile lit his impassive face as they were once again back where they'd started.

"So what? He seemed pretty confused-" He bit his lip as Quatre squirmed again, in a very distracting manner, "aaah... - maybe all he needs is a shock to get back to normal."

Quatre gasped as he was once more brought back down. "Th-that's n-not how you help people who are confused. Let me go!" But the order was now entirely pro-forma.

Trowa brought him down again, even harder, hips twisting up to hit the little throbbing pulse of pleasure within his lover's body.

"Are you enjoying this as much as I am?" he panted. Quatre had gone the same pretty red as the roof of the vardo. His eyes were closed and he was biting his lip to avoid making any more noises that Heero would probably come and investigate. The way he was now lifting himself up and letting Trowa pull him down had no longer anything to do with escaping, which answered the shaman's question.

Trowa had grown up a Nightwalker, with the same taboos as the animals which were the tribe's shaman guides, which is to say, very few. Apart from immediate family and those too young, any man or woman was fair game, and he'd had many throughout the towns he’d traveled, anyone who would accept to love and be loved without strings attached and with very few words either.

He'd forgotten all of them the moment he first saw Quatre.

He had remembered each and everyone one of them later, during the months of extreme frustration that had followed, but had finally given them all up the moment Quatre had shyly kissed him for the first time, even though it had looked quite likely that Trowa would, from that moment on, never have sex again.

Quatre was an arcane healer, a young priest managing a small temple and clinic in a town surrounded by fever-haunted swamps. He had been dedicated as an infant to some god or other; Trowa had never bothered much with the details other than those that mattered. Namely, that the god in question required celibacy from his followers, and that those followers considered sex between males to be one of the seven grievous sins or whatever. Two major hurdles to overcome, and for a long time he didn't think he'd be able to. Quatre had accepted with some trepidation to allow the shaman to stay at his small clinic, when Trowa had offered to help gather herbs for his medicines. The only other priest on location was an elderly man who was supposed to teach Quatre healing, and spent most of his time drunk and singing naughty variations of their order’s hymns while locked up in the belfry, so Quatre really had needed the help.

They'd become friends during their long talks and walks in the gardens, but Quatre was still nervous around him. Most people were nervous around Nightwalkers. They tended to avoid the shamans. Actually, what they'd do was lock up their spouses, sons, daughters and pets when they heard one was in town, and *then* avoid them. Which was stupid. No nightwalker would ever take what wasn't freely given. So Quatre had been perfectly safe, and Trowa the one in grave risk of dying of extreme frustration. Which he would have, rather than lose their friendship. And he quite joyfully abstained from sex with anyone else, rather than lose whatever chance there was that friendship could lead to something deeper.

The long months of growing camaraderie and platonic love -delightfully highlighted by that one shy kiss- and been abruptly interrupted by those fools in the religious order. They'd found out that a Nightwalker was hanging around the most promising young acolyte they had. A deacon had shown up with two adjudicators in tow to evict Trowa from the town and order Quatre back to the main cloister, avoiding any more contact with the unclean animal.

Trowa found himself, twenty four confused hours later, driving a determined Quatre away in the vardo, away from everything he'd ever known, the clinic, the cloister, the order itself. Trowa had remembered to drop a handful of silver coins in the charity box of the temple before Quatre had slammed the door shut with a determined clang. He owed the old farts that much for pressing the matter and bringing things to a head. He would never have presumed to.

Quatre had admitted to Trowa by his decision, if not in words, that he loved the latter more than any future he had in his religious order, and that was already more than enough. Of course, there still wasn't any sex. Quatre had a martyr streak a mile wide. He wouldn't compromise his mission in life, which was healing. Well, that was fair enough. Except that the young and newly defrocked priest believed his healing powers came from the grace of his god, and his god required celibacy. Trowa agreed that Quatre should keep his vow of chastity if that was what was needed to heal the injured and sick they encountered in their nomadic life together.

Trowa decided not to mention that he knew quite a bit about gods, had met a few of them, and even slept with one during a glorious night of his youth. He knew that gods interfered with the affairs of men much less than their followers assumed, outside of the confines of Sources, and that Quatre’s healing powers, like his empathy, came from within and did not require any oath at all. Or if this was somehow linked to a god, and the loss of chastity would remove those powers, then here was a deity Trowa did not want to meet and did not much approve of.

But he didn't say this to Quatre. This was something the young man had to figure out on his own. Chances were that he wouldn't but, well, such was life, and sex wasn't everything in it.

Trowa was content with a life full of love and friendship (and no sex), and would have been for the rest of his life. Though in actuality it only lasted two months, until Quatre happened upon him while Trowa was bathing after a long day of travel.

The shaman was shaking off the water from the creek, drying himself in the sun at its edge, when he was bowled over by a hurricane with at least six hands. They landed in a tangle in the reeds at the edge of the creek. Trowa had tried to protest and actually managed to finish his sentence, though the way Quatre was ripping off his own clothes was distracting him considerably. He tried to remind Quatre of his vow and his mission of healing the injured with his powers. Quatre had snarled something about using band-aids from now on, and leaped on to the shaman who had nothing more to say.

After a very long night, during which Quatre had broken his vow of chastity no less than four times, it turned out his powers were still in perfect working order. Trowa was not very surprised.

Of course, it could still be a little frustrating. Quatre was absurdly shy about a lot of things, and he clung to many of the taboos and edicts his religion had placed upon him. He went from complete chastity to complete fidelity, for one. Trowa had once more shrugged and acquiesced. Having sex exclusively with Quatre was better than having sex with any other number of partners, and much better than none at all. He was content. In fact, in the three years they'd been together, he'd only ever felt one niggle of regret. A naked Heero Yuy could distract anybody from such considerations, for a few moments.

Quatre cried out, impaling himself onto Trowa as he came, his beauty far greater than any of the stone statues his order worshiped in their cold cloisters. Trowa's eyes never left that beloved face as he worshiped that body with his own once more. No, even a dozen naked Heeros couldn't make him regret this. He'd found his One and Only.

The pair collapsed on the vardo's narrow cot, panting and gasping in the late evening's heat, trapped in the caravan's dark and airless corners.

"I still want to examine him again.” Quatre wiped the sweat from his fair skin, but made no other effort to move. “His aura is so...self-contained. It doesn’t feel normal, it could be hiding some deeper problem. Maybe this is one of those instances where healing should be technological rather than arcane - not that I have a hospital or an x-ray machine handy...We also need to find out who he is, where he comes from, and why your line led you to him. Should we go back to where you found him and look around some more? You said there weren’t any clues, but-"

“No clue, no tracks to show where he came from. No sign of magic, no smell of a drop-ship or horse or any way of bringing him there. There was a faint feel beneath the earth. I think there was a very old Source there once. But it was inactive, no energy output whatsoever.”

“He’s obviously not from a Source. He’d have returned to energy long before you got him back here. So how do we help him?”

"We'll go see Svale. The old crone will know," Trowa murmured sleepily. “She’s the one who asked me to check out the portents in the first place.”

"It'll take us over a week to reach her. Maybe Heero won't want to come with us." Quatre’s eyes were darting towards the side of the vardo where they could hear Heero occasionally shift as he sat against a wheel. Trowa had put out a bedroll for him next to the banked campfire, but Heero hadn’t seemed interested.

"What else is he going to do? He can go sit on a rock in the middle of a desert some other time," Trowa murmured prosaically before rising and preparing for the night.

\---

Next Chapter: Trouble Comes In A Pretty Package  
In which our adventurers meet a young man, Duo, in deep trouble. Or so he says. Trouble does seem to follow him around, possibly on a leash. Also, Heero meets a gun.


	2. Trouble Comes In A Pretty Package

"So Heero, did you sleep well?"

Heero had made no fuss about following them. In fact he’d not seemed to question it at all. He was now walking on one side of the horses pulling the vardo while Trowa walked on the other side, hand on his weapons. Quatre guided the horses from the vardo's seat, leaning forward to talk to the stranger.

Heero stared straight ahead of him. "No."

"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Did you have a nightmare? Can you tell me about it? Maybe it will-"

"I didn't sleep."

"Oh." Quatre wondered what Heero had done all night then, leaning against the caravan’s wheel. "You must be tired. Do you want to lie down for awhile? We're still in safe territory." Anything south of the wild, uninhabitable region of the Mater was pretty lawless, bar self-contained fiefdoms and city-states, but not enough people lived in the badlands to make it dangerous.

"No."

"Very well." Quatre gave Trowa a hesitant look, afraid he'd said something wrong. Trowa gave him a small reassuring smile. Fortified, Quatre turned back to Heero.

"You have a strange accent to your Common. Where do you come from?"

Heero said nothing.

"...Do you come from around here?"

“No.”

"Do you come from off planet?"

"I don't know."

Quatre was so relieved to get an answer - other than ‘no’ - that it took him a beat to realize what Heero had said.

"You-you don't know?! How can you not know if you come from another planet or not?"

"I don't know what a planet is."

Quatre’s wide-eyed gaze went from Heero to a frowning Trowa.

"A Troglodyte?" Quatre leaned towards his lover so he could speak softly over the clop of hooves. “Some of them don’t wear clothes.”

"I doubt it. Too clean. Too articulate - oddly enough. Didn’t try to brain us with a rock, either. Certainly not a Technologist though."

Quatre had re-examined Heero the night before, but had found nothing, either with his magic or with the medical kit he also carried around. Trowa had attempted to Walk around the man as the moon first rose, and it was like walking into a wall. There were no lines of sickness or injury around him, though. That and Quatre's diagnosis indicated there was nothing wrong with him, physically or mentally.

"Do you know where you are?" Quatre asked Heero gently.

Heero glanced around. "Here."

Trowa gave a small snort of amusement that only Quatre heard.

"More specifically. Um, you are at the Center. The planet at the spiritual center of the human colonization of the galaxy. The font of Sources." It's a dangerous, strange and violent place, and not one you should roam around in a daze, Quatre felt like adding, but doubted that Heero had chosen his condition deliberately. 

"It's a good thing you found him, Trowa, who knows what could have happened to him if you hadn't."

"Hm."

"Don't worry, Heero, we won't let anything harm you. And we'll try to help you with your, um, condition."

Heero continued to walk, his eyes fixed on the road curling ahead.

"Right. Um, since you don't know, I guess I'll tell you." Quatre had gotten used to Trowa's silences, but Heero was making him nervous. The empathy that was at the root of his powers ached to get some response, any response. "There are many inhabited planets in the known galaxy. Humans have- are you fully human, Heero, or are you an alternate?"

"No.”

"No...? What-...Okay. Um, you see, you could be either. Center has all kinds. As the mythical Center of our galaxy, people from every race have been drawn here sooner or later. Except those alternate human species that post-evolved on very remote planets that haven’t been rediscovered since the Scattering, of course. They wouldn’t have the means of traveling here yet. But they dream of Center, and tell her stories, even if they don’t know it; She is at the heart of the arcane and spiritual tapestry that defines us as Human, whatever sub-species we come from. Center even has enclaves of refugees from races that no longer exist anywhere else, their homeland destroyed by natural disasters, or war, or the Scourge. Center welcomes them all, the living and the dying. The wheel turns." Quatre smiled at Trowa as he used the Nightwalker prayer, the only one they had. It sounded so much more sober, accepting and beautiful than his own religion's massive, chastising chants.

Heero walked on in unimpressed silence.

“We...” This conversation was like pushing the caravan up a hill, and the horses too. “We are going to try to help you. We’re traveling to see a friend of ours. She read something odd in a divination ritual. Trowa found a line-” probably no need to go into details. Heero didn’t seem interested. “She can hopefully help us. We’ll be there in, oh, maybe eight days if all goes well.”

Silence.

“Of course, we could be at Svale's in an hour with a planet hopper, and we could reach the next solar system in a week with an Ether-ripper, but Center doesn't take well to technology. It's the place for fundamental forces, the arcane works better here than the mechanical. And neither Trowa nor I are Technologists." Although for once, Quatre was regretting having to use the brightly painted caravan and would have gladly swapped it for anything that could get them to Svale's faster.

Heero walked on as if he had all the time in the world to get to an unknown destination to meet a stranger. 

Quatre decided to shut up and direct the horses for awhile. At least they responded when he gave them a tug of the rein. 

 

Not only did the vardo not miraculously transform into a Technologist vehicle (Gods were never that reliable, Quatre had learned that finally), but at the end of the day it looked like their trip might have been stalled considerably.  
There was a big encampment at the foot of the Regio mountains. The river Reg was in full force, thundering down the ravines and flooding the plains beyond. The Source at its base was acting up again. This had been happening a lot recently, all over Center. The waters had risen suddenly three days ago, surging high enough to cover the stone bridge that normally straddled the river. Most people in the temporary camp, barred access to the safe road on the other side of the normally calm waters, were getting ready for a long stay or turning back to where they'd come from.

They settled the vardo on the outskirts of the camp, along with a few other new arrivals. Trowa and Quatre discussed what could be done, while Heero looked on in sublime indifference.

"There's been an uprising in Moonrath." The crusty old trader scratched a grime-covered face, dislodging a bit of dirt and adding more from soiled fingernails. "So the west is out. East is the mountains, so no one is going that way. Most people are heading back south, to go around the mountains and reach the bridge at Goreine."

"That'll take weeks." Quatre fidgeted.

"Well yeah, which is why I'm stayin' here." The man spat, a dirty trickle of saliva and some dark gum he was chewing. "The river maiden says the waters will go down in a couple weeks or so. It'll be quicker."

Trowa frowned. The quickest would be to go through the mountains. This would get them even closer to Svale, who lived on the other side of the Reg river, a half day from the foot of the range. Their trip would last a little over a week instead of three. Or forever, as people who entered the mountain range of the Regio didn’t always come out again. Trowa had crossed the range on two other occasions, but wasn't in any hurry to do so again with only Quatre and an unknown quantity like Heero at his side.

"Oops, here comes trouble," the merchant grunted, looking over Trowa's shoulder. "Whatever you do, don't say yes."

Quatre and Trowa turned. A young man was walking swiftly through the camp, intently examining the new arrivals settling down for the night. His eyes, a startling deep blue, were wide and worried. A long chestnut braid swished along his back like the tail of a nervous colt.

He passed them and hesitated, quick gaze flicking over Trowa's lean frame and Heero's muscled one. He seemed to want to say something, but appeared deterred by their stony silence. He didn't even glance at Quatre. After a moment he walked on.

"Trouble," the merchant murmured. "That young man has gotten more people killed than the river Reg rising."

"Why?" Quatre stared at the stranger's receding back in surprise.

"He got himself into a fix with some kind of bandit. Seems to be that dreaded Shinigami," the man whispered, glancing around carefully. "You've heard of him?"

"No." Quatre shook tousled golden hair and leaned closer to the man, despite the smell.

"People don't know much about him. There's only rumors. They say he's a killer, and insane, kills for fun. He likes to steal anything that's not nailed down, especially artifacts of high power. He's devious and secretive, no one knows what he looks like or what he's capable of. If someone finds out, they're as good as dead." The merchant was obviously enjoying himself, his voice lowering portentously in the gathering gloom.

"What does he have to do with that young man?"

"Well, Maxwell there was a member of a band of hunters, tracking magical creatures all over this region. But his whole band was massacred by this bandit, this Shinigami, who claims this range for his own."

"There are many bandits hiding in the Regio," Trowa said, his first words all evening.

"Oh yes, but there's been a lot less since Shinigami took up residence." The merchant grinned mirthlessly. "Maxwell escaped the slaughter, and offered to lead a group of knights from Moonrath to the bandit's hideout. Shinigami has several prices on his head. Well, they'd-"

"This Maxwell knows the mountains well enough to serve as a guide?" Trowa was suddenly interested.

"Yeah, I suppose he does. But that doesn't mean he can navigate around death. The knights found out the hard way. The ones guarding the rear end of the company stumbled onto a massacre. Bodies everywhere, all six knights of the Moonrath vanguard slain, some before they could even draw their weapons. Limbs hacked off, disemboweled, genitals crushed, heads missing. And Maxwell crouched in the center of the bloody mess, that long braid clutched in his hands, muttering about death. He didn't have a speck of blood on him. Might explain why the remaining Knights let him live. That and the fact he looked traumatized. They dragged him out of the mountain, wanted to take him back to Moonrath to get another party of Knights together and go back."

The man leaned forward conspiratorially. The smell of stale sweat wafted towards them. The gathering darkness loomed behind the old man as he lowered his voice.

"They overtook a caravan on their way to Moonrath. The caravan caught up with them an hour later. All remaining knights were dead, right at the boundary stone that indicates the end of the Regio range. They were in the same state as the others. Maxwell was sitting on the boundary stone. Apparently, Shinigami told him that he was now the bandit's property." The old man leered. "He gave Maxwell three months to get out of the bind, and if he couldn't, well...But Shinigami’s promised to kill anybody who tries to protect the guy, or take him away from the mountains. Considering what happened to the Knights, Maxwell isn't going anywhere.

"The caravan was also heading to Moonrath and told the council what had happened. They sent out more men, and then a champion or two. Some bounty hunters showed up as well. Same result. Maxwell's still here. Since the river swelled, he's been asking for help from the people staying at the camp. There's been some pretty strange folk caught on this side of the river, and a few have followed Maxwell into the mountain, hoping to get at Shinigami's loot. None of them have come back. He's getting desperate, he's only got a few weeks left."

"Poor young man," Quatre murmured, then glanced up at Trowa, who shook his head firmly.

"Are you sure?" Quatre looked pained. "Heero could-... um, Trowa?" His voice was suddenly tense.

Trowa glanced around, then turned slowly.

"Heero, put that down.” Behind Trowa, the dirty merchant took one look at the situation, felt the tension in the air, and disappeared into the dusk.

Heero glanced up, then back down at the shotgun he was holding, which was normally tied above the vardo's doorway. He didn't seem to be in any hurry to obey Trowa.

"Heero, I mean it. That thing is dangerous." Trowa took a careful step towards Heero.

"It’s a weapon." Heero twisted the stock left and right. 

"Yes. _My_ weapon." But Heero wasn't picking up the hint. "Give it to me, Heero."

"Hn." Heero twisted the stock again, then flipped off the security. Trowa took a quick sidestep to put himself in front of a wide-eyed Quatre. Heero lifted the barrel to his shoulder in a smooth movement and squeezed the trigger without seeming to aim.

A considerable distance away, in the dim evening light, the wind vane at the top of a little crossroad temple was shot clean off.

Trowa found himself staring at the stock of his shotgun. The security was on again. Heero was looking at him without interest as he held it out to him by the barrel.

"Wow, that was amazing!"

Trowa had been thinking along those lines; Heero had fired an unknown gun without even a tracer shot to hit a barely visible target, it was in fact a bit more than amazing. But the exclamation did not come from him, or Quatre. They all turned towards the scruffy young man who had appeared behind them.

"You guys seem to know what you're doing. Um, do you want to avoid waiting for the river to go down? ‘Cause I know a fairly safe way through the mountains, pretty safe for tough guys like you. You won't even have to pay me, you just need to help me with a little problem first. Please say yes!" Maxwell gave them a brilliant, pleading smile and his eyes widened in supplication. "Please?"

 

Next chapter: At Least We Didn't Have To Wait Long...

Trouble is a state our heroes had better get used to. So it might as well happen quickly. Long delays are irritating.


	3. At Least We Didn't Have To Wait Long...

"He's big, he's ugly and he's very strong. He's got half a dozen toughs with him," Maxwell muttered as he walked next to the vardo. "That's all I know. I don't know if he's this Shini-person everyone's talking about. We were never formally introduced."

"Didn't he say anything to you at all?" Quatre asked him sympathetically.

"Yeah. He said, 'Mine', and then he smiled and said 'In three months'. Then he stomped on the last Knight who was still twitching, collected the man’s weapons and walked off." Maxwell's face was pinched, his eyes haunted.

"I'm sorry." Quatre was going to add more, but he had to concentrate on driving the vardo around a heap of fallen rock. They were on the main road through the Regio range - the only road, really. It wasn't often used and in considerable disrepair. Trowa hoped he'd be able to get the vardo through all the way. The road would get rougher, then vanish eventually, and then they'd have to rely on Maxwell to guide them along one of the few hard-to-find hunter’s paths out of the range.

"Well, I'm sure that you guys won't have any problems with him." Maxwell gave them a grin, though he didn't look very hopeful. He tossed his braid and walked faster, past the toiling horses. Maxwell was in his early twenties, Trowa judged, about Heero's height, dressed all in black. Leather trousers, well worn and reinforced for horse-riding, a leather vest, patched in the back, black leather wrist guards, short black leather gloves buttoning on the palm, and a wide black leather thong tied several times around his forehead, fluffing out his unruly chestnut bangs, before coiling back and twisting in and out of his braid. He looked appealing; Trowa could see why the bandit had decided he was 'Mine', though the reason for the three month delay was less clear. Unless it was pure sadism?

The black-clad young man trotted up to his previous position, as close to Heero as he dared. He walked beside Heero for a few minutes, apparently admiring him out of the corner of his eye.

"You're very good with that." He pointed to the shotgun that Trowa had given to Heero. "I'm afraid that this bandit and his buddies are shielded against bullets, though. Are you good with that too?" He pointed at the sword that Trowa had also given to Heero, on the off chance he could use it with the same efficiency. When questioned, Heero had stated that it was a weapon, and then kept it, so there was that.

Heero said nothing.

Maxwell - he said his first name was Duo - had been trying to get a rise out of Heero for the last four hours, since they'd set out at first light. He'd not had much success. He'd given up on Trowa the night before. Quatre had chatted with him kindly, while artfully avoiding most of his questions, smiling gently. Duo would still drop back to talk to the healer on occasion, but he seemed intent on getting some response out of Heero, possibly to insure the latter would protect him in case of attack.

Trowa's eye ran over the rocks and gulleys on either side of the mountain road before returning to the slender black figure again. He'd Walked around the young man last night, as well as taking a look at the river. The river was as bad as they said it was, no one was crossing that for at least a week and probably more. The high waters flooding the ford were one thing; the chaotic energy and elemental power pouring out of the Source and ripping through the high waters made it a death trap.

As for Duo Maxwell, the young man had strange lines running around him, but most of that could be explained by the shock and trauma of the past few months. Indeed, when his circumstances were taken into consideration, his mind was in remarkably good state. There was nothing very suspicious about him, he didn't seem to be hiding anything, and his offer to lead them through the mountains and help them face the dangers there seemed genuine enough. All they had to do was to beat off this mountain bandit who was after him, then the deal would be done and they'd save a considerable amount of time.

Trowa checked his bolts and crossbow, hanging over his shoulder. His runic wristband was firm on his left forearm, a brown leather guard going from wrist to elbow, carved with symbols and inset with beads and stones. He had no use for the sword he'd lent to Heero, enemies rarely got close enough to the shaman for him to use it.

His remaining eye closed as he concentrated; the eyelid over his other eye, pupil covered in a film like droplets of moonlight, twitched. He could feel the mind of several animal guides around him, but in daylight it was hard to follow their lines. He could only feel an air of menace around them. This bandit and his men knew they were here. The travelers were being watched. 

Well hopefully they wouldn't have to wait too long to sort this out.

Maxwell was cautious but fairly unconcerned as he led them carefully around another bend in the old road. Heero was a short distance behind him. Trowa was walking near the vardo to protect Quatre. He could understand why Duo seemed fairly easy with the situation. After all, whatever happened, the bandit didn't seem to want to hurt him just yet. And Trowa didn't think the young man would lose much sleep over another group of travelers getting killed trying to protect him from his fate. 

"You have your shields up?" he asked Quatre on the heels of that thought. The latter was an open target on the vardo’s seat.

"For the third time, love, yes." Quatre grinned at him, clearly not minding his lover's concern.

"Hm." That would stop a first wave of attack, but- 

Somewhere high above their heads, a crow saw something shiny in the rocks she was overflying, something metallic. The sudden ripple of interest in her mind echoed through the lines of the earth...

“Here it comes,” said Trowa suddenly, as lines fused and converged all around them. His crossbow was in his hand, the gesture to grab and draw it as instinctive as breathing. 

Maxwell glanced back. “Hmm, what did you-” He almost bumped into Heero who’d stopped as soon as Trowa had spoken. 

Up ahead, to their left and down the slope some forty feet away, an intruder stinking of metal and leather put a foot down on a ground squirrel’s tunnel entrance, partly caving it in. The inhabitants’ alarm, already high, skyrocketed, sending them scurrying to other exits in case the strange creature dug in after them. Tiny prickles lit up more lines in Trowa’s Vision. 

Quatre quickly slipped on the vardo’s brakes and cinched the reins on their holder. 

“Scoot back,” Trowa said, again completely uselessly as Quatre knew exactly where to sit in this kind of situation.

Up ahead, a clearly puzzled Maxwell looked from Trowa to Heero. The latter was standing stolidly as if he had all day, his eyes on the road up ahead. 

“Uh...what’s going on?” Then a clatter of stones from somewhere behind their group made Duo tense. 

Trowa felt two people scrambling down a sharp incline to block the vardo's retreat, while four others appeared on the road up ahead of them on either side. And one more man loomed beyond them, turning the bend and advancing upon them at a deliberate pace.

Maxwell made a small worried noise and slipped behind Heero. 

The last man to arrive moved towards them with a ponderous, measured step. The other highwaymen waited until he’d walked past them and then fell in at his side like hyenas following a lion, boxing the travelers in. Trowa's eyes flicked dismissively over the common roughs, but he watched their leader carefully. He was taller than even Trowa, a head higher at least. His face was so crisscrossed with scars it was almost unreadable. His hair was creamy white and gathered in a topknot. He was dressed in dark red leather, covered in thick plates of black armor that looked like lacquered steel. It was the armor that Trowa noticed particularly. The lines around it screamed and bent, shivering away from it. Highly magical, very nasty, death and blood solidified. It wasn't a spell the shaman was familiar with, but he was willing to bet the armor was tough. A huge sword hung from the bandit's back.

"He's here alright, boss,” one of the goons said. “Looks like he's trying to run away with some other suckers again."

Duo scowled at the man, a thin well-balanced dagger flickering into his hand.

"Do we have to kill these?" The lack of resistance was encouraging the cockroaches. One of the bandit came up close to Heero with a leer. Trowa didn't need his Vision-eye to see what was going to happen. His fingers swept over two readied bolts in their cradle, his senses centered on the two behind the vardo blocking their retreat. He heard one of them snicker. They had shields, simple but effective magical constructs hooked to their belt which would repeal projectiles such as a bullet or a crossbow bolt.

The scum who’d approached Heero was taller than he was, thick leather armor and chain protecting a large muscled frame. His sword was an unspoken threat to keep Heero still. Heero looked at him blankly. The shotgun hung loosely from his left hand and the sword from his belt, unused. When he didn't move, the man drew nearer with a sneer.

"It'd be a waste. This one is reaaal pretty." The man reached up to grab the front of Heero's borrowed jerkin. Behind him, Duo made a sound in his throat, but looked too scared to intervene.

Heero looked at the bandit.

Then he dropped his eyes to the hand holding his jerkin.

A small frown creased his brow. His eyes were strangely blank though.

The man opened his mouth to say something else. 

The sword cut up through the chest, into his jaw and tore through his face as it sent him crashing over backwards. Even Trowa, who was expecting it, had not seen the beginning of the movement.

Heero fired the shotgun from the hip, left-handed. The man nearest him was thrown back by the force of the shot hitting his shield. Heero ducked under another bandit's swinging sword with a minimal movement, not even glancing at the spelled blade whistling an inch over his back. His hand opened - the gun dropped but was caught by the fore-end, jerked once as he stood up, bullet ejecting, next one loading from the four-shell magazine with a click. The gun fell through his fingers until they hit the trigger- 

The man felled by the first bullet staggered back up to his knees, his magical shields still crackling from the impact; he was just in time to get hit by the second shot, hurling him off the road and down a ravine. Heero then swung the stock of the shotgun, still held in his left hand, into the neck of the man he'd dodged. Swung in a circle and brought the sword in a quick neat flick down through the man's throat as he staggered away.

The fourth man was already down, a slender dagger in his right eye. Maxwell was up against one of the big rocks in the road, another dagger ready, his eyes flicking between Heero and the boss, who hadn't moved.

Trowa had not waited for the first shotgun shot to imprint its echoes in the ravines and gulleys around them, he'd spun around and fired the large crossbow at the first man leaping towards him. The man was thrown back, screaming and writhing around the bolt that went so unexpectedly straight through his shield and into his gut. The other bandit reacted too late. The second bolt caught her in the chest, just under the collarbone. She fell like a stone with only a long bubbling moan. The first man was still screaming, trying to jerk the bolt out. Trowa sent another bolt to silence him, and then turned back to the main action.

Heero's first victim was convulsing still, the only movement in the road.

The boss reached over his shoulder and slowly drew out his sword from its scabbard. Large blade, hand-and-a-half grip, almost as long as the large guy’s leg, but despite what it must weigh, he carried it tip up in just one hand. 

"It seems my little sweet thing has finally found someone with a bit of spirit," he rumbled, his voice low with a faint lisp from a scar across his mouth, lifting one corner of his lip in a twisted half-circle. He didn’t even glance at the bodies of his men littered around him. The lines joining the group had shown a dynamic that was at the far end of tenuous, so no great surprise there, but neither did he appear worried at finding himself now outnumbered and facing several projectile weapons. "I'll be much stronger once I've killed you. Much stronger." He took one step towards Heero, then another. Behind Yuy, Maxwell shrunk back into the rock, his face pinched.

Heero, face still blank, bent forward and put the shotgun on the ground, then straightened as if he had all day to meet the big bandit's charge.

The huge sword swung back and forth with a whine of cut air. Trowa evaluated its weight, the speed and ease with which its owner swung it, and frowned. This one wasn't your average highwayman, that was for sure. His shields might be able to resist the shaman's runed bolts, and Trowa had lent Heero his only proximity weapon, apart from a hunting knife. Heero would be facing the giant alone.

\---

Next Chapter: Shinigami

Heero doesn’t like his borrowed sword. It is not functionally adequate. 

Also in the next chapter: we meet a flying rock, who is adorable, and the real Duo Maxwell, who is not.


	4. Shinigami

Heero wasn't looking at the mass of muscle and steel approaching him. He was glaring at Trowa's sword which he was swishing back and forth. He jabbed with it, then shook it some more as if it wasn't working like he expected.

“Hey-” Duo started to say. The boss was almost upon his target.

Heero didn't lift his head, merely dodged the blow that hammered into the ground where he'd been with enough force to score the packed dirt, raising a veil of dust in the air. The huge sword immediately slashed sideways. Such speed! Trowa's mouth went dry as he re-evaluated their opponent once again. Unlike Quatre, Trowa had heard a bit about Shinigami and he didn't think this was him, Shinigami’s reputation as a thief and a killer was something else again, but the giant wasn't any slouch with that big pig-sticker of his either.

But Heero...wasn't there. The boss staggered and stared at the young man who was several feet away from him. The boss had moved surprisingly fast. Heero's speed had been uncanny. And he was still looking at Trowa's sword with a disappointed scowl.

The big bandit’s eyes narrowed, but he did not seem to be worried. His scar tissue moved under a cruel, hacked grin as he lifted his sword. Power flowed from the armor, like a spring coiling towards an explosive release.

"Heero! Forget the damn sword and fight already!" Duo suddenly shouted from a prudent distance away.

Heero looked up from the weapon and seemed to contemplate Duo’s words for a few seconds, then he nodded firmly in apparent agreement -

\- and tossed the sword aside just as the boss charged towards him. 

Maxwell's screech of alarm covered the swish of air cut to shreds.

Heero ducked under the guard of the down-swinging sword, caught the sword-arm and brought it down against his knee with the force of the raging river Reg nearby.

The magical armor was tougher than steel. It shattered. The bone beneath it didn't stand a chance. It ripped up through flesh and skin until it hit the upper side of the armor into which it embedded.

The boss howled and wildly swung a fist at Heero, who dodged it without looking. He dropped the mangled arm and struck straight out with his elbow, knocking the bandit back a pace. Then he spun in an elegant circle, and his foot smashed against the man's side, sending him crashing to the ground.

The boss managed to roll onto his knees, his face ashen beneath the twisted spiral of scars on his face. Heero was already upon him. This time the blow was prepared and had his full weight behind it.  
Even Trowa winced as the man's chest plate was smashed, throwing him back three feet despite his mass. The huge man choked and coughed.  
Heero walked towards him with the same steady pace -

"No," Quatre gasped.

\- grabbed him by the neck, lifting him effortlessly to his knees, right fist drawn back to deliver a devastating final punch to the man's face.

"Heero! Don't!" Quatre yelled.

Heero's fist stayed poised in the air. For a few long seconds he stood there. His left hand was the only thing keeping the bandit on his knees. It didn't tremble in the slightest.

Then he dropped the bandit and turned around.

Duo made a noise of protest in his throat as the bandit twitched, then crawled to his knees. Without a backward glance, he staggered to his feet and lurched away, clutching his badly injured arm.

Heero didn't seem to notice. He walked back to where the fight had started and picked up the shotgun and Trowa's sword, which he began to clean on one of the fallen bandits.

"You didn't kill him," Duo said carefully, visibly trying not to scream in frustration at someone who could knot him like a string without breaking a sweat.

"Hn."

"Um, why?"

Heero frowned. "Quatre said not to."

"Oh." Duo glanced at a white-faced Quatre. Then he smiled and approached Heero slowly. "Not that I’m complaining. I'm bloody grateful. You beat him good, he won't bother me anymore. I can lead you out of these mountains and get out of here myself now."

He took the last few steps separating him from Heero and laid a gentle hand on his forearm, smiling as he fixed blue eyes on blue. "I really am very grateful to you, Heero. I-"

The smile froze. Heero had looked at him, then dropped his glance down at the hand on his forearm...

Duo snatched his hand away and took a few steps back. "I'll be grateful to you over here, then, shall I? Um, we okay?" He seemed ready to bolt. Heero's expression had been horribly familiar, much the same one he’d given the first bandit; a frown, and a gaze that was as empty as a freshly dug grave waiting for a body.

Heero turned and walked on down the road, avoiding the pools of blood from his victims.

Trowa grabbed the horses' halters, soothing them with a whisper, calming them to get them past the bloody remains of battle. He was frowning too. He remembered hauling Heero to his feet when they'd met. Quatre had also given him a very thorough physical examination. Heero had made no dangerous gestures towards them at all. Which, seeing the result, was fortunate. Why did he brush off Maxwell? Battle heat, Trowa supposed, and made a note to himself not to get near the stranger for the next hour at least.

 

In the falling twilight, camp was set up with few words. Quatre and Duo were both silenced by the day's events, and almost as taciturn as their traveling companions. Duo sat down for three seconds as Trowa started making the fire, then stood up again.

"I'm going to have a quick look at the road up ahead. It's been a few months since I've been able to walk these mountains like I wanted to. I'll make sure nothing is lurking around."

"That could be dangerous," Quatre objected, a worried look on his wan face.

"If you hear screaming, then you were probably right." Duo grinned and trotted off into darkness.

Quatre looked at Heero uncomfortably. His hands were lifted towards the fire as if he felt cold. The healer could cast a mean mana bolt, kill when he needed to, but death was his only enemy, and the cold executions of that day had chilled him.

Trowa stoked up the fire well and hung the pot with the day's rations on the hook he planted near it. He swung the pot over the edge of the fire, and handed the long spoon to Heero, who took it with a cautious frown.

"Heero."

The man glanced up. Trowa leaned towards him slowly, still holding on to the spoon.

"Heero, Maxwell is a bit loud and flighty, but I don't think he's a threat. I need him to guide me out of the Regio. It's been too long since I've been here, and this place is dangerous. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Good. Do you think Maxwell is going to be a problem?"

Heero's eyes turned slowly to where Duo had disappeared.

"No. He's easy to kill if he tries anything."

Trowa's lips tightened.

"Well, don't kill him unless you're very sure he tried something. Don't exterminate him because he makes a pass at you, got it? We need him."

"Hn."

"Right. Stir this every few minutes, should be done in less than an hour."

Trowa stood, walked over to a shivering, wide-eyed Quatre, swung the healer up into his arms and, ignoring his weak protests, strode off towards the vardo.

 

From high up the rock face against which they were camped, Duo looked down at the scene with a small amused smile.

Then he straightened and disappeared as if the gathering dusk had etched him out of existence.

An instant later and seven miles away, he reappeared at the entrance to a cave, dropping out of the darkness like a cat. The entrance to the cavern was partially reinforced with bricks and crude stone barriers. He whistled gently as he strolled in and bent to open a chest against one of the walls.

"Master?"

The voice was tiny, high-pitched and grinding; like a baby rock, if such things existed and could speak.

A small creature flitted through the cavern's darkness. It was about the size of a man's fist, a dark reddish brown with black chitin covering its small chest and back. It was vaguely humanoid, small arms and legs and a relatively big head, with crude features and big, bird-like black eyes.

Duo Maxwell paid it no attention. He was lifting out several objects, putting some of them in the slim pack he'd been carrying since they left the camp that morning.

The creature flitted around his head. It had wings like a bat, but it was obvious that it wasn't using those to fly, since it was hovering most of the time and the wings only beat on occasion.

Duo grunted as he pulled out a small circle of murky glass from the chest. He strode towards the entrance of the cavern where a slice of moon cast a watery glow. He covered the circle in his hands for a second, then tossed it in the air. It hung there, spinning. Its edges blurred and grew. Soon Duo was looking at an evanescent globe hovering before his face.

"Master?" The small creature was twisting a bloody rag in its tiny hands. "I've been taking care of Fardyo. He’s not coughing blood anymore, but his arm is pretty bad, I don't think I can heal it all that well."

Duo looked intently at the image forming in the globe. The vardo appeared, and Heero in front of the fire, dutifully stirring the contents of the pot.

There was noise from the back of the cavern. The creature glanced that way.

"Maxwell..." The rumble was dark with agony and anger.

"Isn't he amazing?" Duo murmured, his gaze on Heero's face as the vision centered on him. "Weird as a bag full of ferrets, but what a fighter. They're all pretty good. The shaman shot that bolt right through those dinky shields I gave the riffraff. I didn't get a chance to look at what he's using yet. I'll have to steal one. But this guy...I wonder who -and what- the hell he is..."

"Is he the one that beat Fardyo?" The creature flitted before the vision.

"Yeah. Barely broke a sweat. And I think there's a lot more where that came from. I was beginning to think this was a stupid idea, but I certainly hit pay dirt. Get your bags packed, Imp. We're outta here."

"Maxwell!" The roar ended in a wheezing gasp of pain.

"Is that the new one then?" Imp was dutifully scrutinizing Heero’s features in the vision.

Duo frowned. "I think they all are. I'm sensing they're something of a package deal...I just met them, I don't know what makes them tick yet."

A huge shadow leaned over him. The light of the rising moon fractured on shards of broken armor.

"Maxwell, don't think you can leave like this." The snarl echoed through the cavern, ending with a wet cough.

"Now mister Fardyo!" Imp squeaked, suddenly shooting around the cavern like an agitated bug. "We have been very kind to you already! You are so much better now than-"

"I want to be stronger! You will make me stronger, Maxwell. We had a deal!"

"It only works as long as you beat them, Fardyo. It's more than a matter of our deal. The magic will only work with their life-force." Duo didn't bother to turn around, his eyes fixed on Heero, puzzled, calculating.

"You are much more powerful than when we first met you, mister Fardyo." Imp hovered in front of the huge man, making placating gestures. "Please do not ask for more. You will heal and you will leave, and not bother my master again. Right?"

The big man clutched his mangled arm to his side with a grimace. "I'll be bothering your master Shinigami plenty. Listen, you little shrimp, you don't scare me! You'll heal this arm and make me stronger-" the image in the globe shifted, Duo frowned in concentration "- or I'll make sure everybody knows that-"

Duo didn’t look away from the globe. There was no visible motion - but now one arm was extended and his gloved hand was wrapped around the taller man’s throat. 

"Mast-"

There was a sickening, ugly crunching crack. Imp barely dodged the spray of blood that decorated the walls of the cavern and the young man at its entrance.

"Did you have to kill him?” Imp sounded weary. “You put so much work into him. Over three months! He was getting quite strong."

"He was a murderous psycho and a complete waste of time." Duo was still looking at the globe's image. He held the body single-handedly, without apparent effort, as if he'd forgotten about it. "But good bait in the end. I caught myself something much more interesting."

"But _he_ will be arriving soon! You won't have time to do much to this new one!"

"That's the beauty of it, I probably won't have to. Though I do have a few ideas. Imp, I'm looking for that nest of wyverns we saw a week ago, where did they get to?" The body thumped to the ground. Duo scratched his chin with a bloody hand, leaving streaks like black paint in the silvery moonlight.

"They moved to the northeast, master."

"Oh right. Hmm, we can be there in two days. I want you to lure them towards us."

"...You do?"

"And I want them to be in a fucking bad mood. Got that?"

The tiny creature seemed to deflate. "Got it, master." It was hovering lower and lower, it was about a foot from Fardyo's body.

"Good. That should be a nice warm-up. See what these boys are worth. I want you to scout out the road ahead of us and spot any other potential surprises we can throw at them." Duo's hand ghosted over his mouth, and he absently licked the blood from a long finger. Then he made a face. "Real waste of time...Why'd I bother..." He flicked his hand. Something black, not unlike his glove, sprang from his wrist guard and curled quickly around his palm and fingers before receding. His clothes seemed to shake and twist around him, and a spatter of blood went flying from the garment, the hand, the long braid, until the young man was once again spotless.

"Right. We'll play it by ear. I'm going back now. Imp, when you- ...Imp?"

He glanced around. There was a small slurping noise instead of the usual grinding voice. Imp was perched on Fardyo's neck, lapping at the blood still trickling from the wound where mangled vertebrae had pierced through the arteries and skin.

Imp squealed as Duo punted it a few feet away where it rolled and ended upside down against a small rock.

"Master?" it muttered, in a voice that can only be described as crushed.

"Pay attention, Imp," Duo growled. "Wyverns. Two days from now. You get. Understand?"

"Yes, Master." Imp rolled itself upright and bounced back up into the air, completely unharmed, though a bit ruffled.

"Good. Keep way out of sight in the meantime, the Nightwalker will sense you a mile away, more than that at night. In fact, don't come anywhere near us, I'll find you whenever I can. Don't forget to dig up some more friends to play with along the way. Just throw anything at us you can find, I think they can handle it."

"Yes. Can I have some of Fardyo's blood now, please, Master Duo?"

Duo made a face as he reached for the sphere, its revolutions slowing as returned to its previous state and dropped into his hand. "If you want, but it's not all that good. Freaky alternate hybrid stewed in magic and massive insecurities. Tastes like dead ends and dirty copper coils."

"I'm hungry."

"Suit yourself, don't come whining to me if you get a stomach ache. Just make sure you get those friggin' wyverns on us on the day after tomorrow."

"Yes, yes."

"Well, back to Heero. I hope whatever he’s stirring tastes better than Fardyo."

"It probably will," Imp sighed, licking the wound again with a grimace on its tiny face.

 

Heero lifted his head at the approaching footsteps. A few seconds later, Duo appeared in the circle of firelight shouldering away the encroaching darkness.

"I’m back, I’m alive, and it's all clear up ahead. Where are the others- no, wait, don't tell me." He looked at the vardo, which was swaying slightly. Duo grinned and sat down next to Heero.

"Looks like they're having a good time."

"They're having sex."

"Yeeees, I gathered that."

"Quatre was hurt."

Duo blinked. "The little squirt was injured? I didn't see anything."

"Inside."

"Er..."

"Trowa is helping him."

"Aaah." Duo looked at Heero carefully. This was as many words as he'd gotten out of Heero all day, maybe the man was thawing a bit. He cataloged the strangeness of the actual conversation for future analysis.

"You know," he murmured, squeezing his hands between his knees and rounding his shoulders, his braid dropping forward and swaying coyly, "I was pretty scared too..."

Silence.

"When that big brute swung his sword at you- " and you threw yours away like an idiot "-I thought my heart would stop." His voice had dropped, husky, inviting.

He glanced up at the utter absence of anything other than uncaring silence. Heero was stirring the pot and ignoring him completely.

A low cry rang out from the vardo, loud in the night’s gathering silence.

Duo slumped forward, elbows on knees. They would take almost a fortnight to get out of the Regio (following his chosen itinerary, which could only be described as the scenic and insanely dangerous route) and they would be attacked on a nearly daily basis if he had anything to say about it. If this was what a typical night was going to be like, this was going to be a looong trip...

\---

 

Next Chapter: Wyverns and Monsters and Crones, Oh My

Wyverns and monsters are negotiable, lecherous old ladies are _not okay_.


	5. Wyverns and Monsters and Crones, Oh My

Duo gathered from rambling and frequently interrupted conversations in the fortnight of traveling together, that Quatre's religious order - former order - had been dedicated to healing. The celibacy nonsense, which Quatre had described with some stiffness, was only one of the axioms of their beliefs. They also emphasized cleanliness (one of the founders had been an ex-Technologist), concentration, meditation, restraint and sobriety for both patient and healer, as well as prayers and hymns during the process of the healing touch.

Duo wondered if abundant kissing had also been part of the practice, or if this was a recent addition to the craft that had occurred after Quatre had handed in his hair-shirt and left. He sighed inwardly as the healer made one more healing pass at Trowa’s chest and one more pass of soft lips on the shaman’s face. Beneath his fingertips, torn muscles mended and skin stitched up seamlessly. 

"Less smooching, more healing, if you don't mind," Duo grumbled. "Or did you forget I'm in agony here?"

Quatre jumped and Trowa winced as he tensed, pulling newly healed muscles. They hadn’t heard him arrive. Duo was as silent as a cat - more accurately, he could be as silent as the cat’s shadow three hours after it had passed on by, but he wasn’t letting them guess that. He always let what he judged to be an adequate sliver of presence and sound escape, the correct amount a hunter and guide would be expected to make, and the two would pick up on that. Normally. They’d both been a bit distracted. 

"I'm sorry!” Quatre gave the arm Duo was nursing against his bare chest a guilty look. “I'm almost finished, I'll be with you in a minute."

"Right. Do I get the full treatment too?" Duo leered.

Quatre gave him an uncomprehending look. "I'll heal your arm completely, Duo, don't worry." Behind him, Trowa was giving their guide a heavy look. Duo grinned amicably and raised his good hand in surrender. His expression sobered as he sat down besides the shaman, examining the nearly healed injury.

"Man, Trowa, I'm real sorry. I've never even seen an armitarger this high up a mountain before."

"Hm. Neither have I."

Duo looked at the Nightwalker carefully, wishing he could read the man better. "We've had the most stupid luck since we took to the road. You must think I'm some terrible guide."

Trowa glanced at him in apparent surprise. "No, you've kept us to one of the few safe routes through the Regio, as far as I can remember."

"What?" Quatre looked up, startled, from his final touches to Trowa’s injury. "We've been attacked nearly every day!"

"Yes, but by creatures which do not normally nest anywhere near the road. It's not Maxwell's fault they decided to come and inspect us."

Quatre looked blank for only a second, then his eyes darted towards Heero a hundred feet away, gathering what wood could be found in the bone-dry gulleys of the Regio range.

"What are you on about?" Duo had been intensely curious to know why he hadn't come under more suspicion. He never thought it was because Heero was taking the fall for him. "What's Heero got to do with any of this?"

Quatre gave Trowa an apologetic glance as he turned towards Duo. "Nothing, Duo, nothing, we just-"

He stared at the arm that Duo was holding out to him, then at the suddenly hard eyes of their guide. The arm was mottled red and purple from elbow to shoulder, and a welt the size of two hands curved down the limb and across an inch of the exposed chest. Duo wasn’t a healer, but these past years on Center had given him more than enough experience of injuries he’d been forced to let through his guard in order to maintain his cover. From the white-hot lances of pain creeping up to his elbow with every heartbeat, he was ready to bet that his right ulna was cracked at the very least. 

"I'd say that if Heero is doing anything to cause more of this," Duo jutted his chin at the injury, "I should know about it."

"I guess I owe you some thanks, Maxwell." Trowa was also examining the young man's arm as he laced up his last spare jerkin and straightened his brown leather headband. "If you hadn't shoved me out of the way of that mandible, you'd still have the full use of your arm and I might have a hole in my chest,."

"Well, you're my client. You're not paying me, but I'm hoping you'll give me a good reference, so I don't want you damaged." At least not unless it was required for the plan. Then all bets were off, naturally. 

Quatre's hands covered the welt and started working on the bone. Duo felt almost more than heard the man’s small tired sigh; they’d been putting their healer through his paces these past few days. As if following the same train of thought, Quatre’s eyes flitted over Duo’s chest, the bruise on his own leg, and the way one of the horses was holding up a hoof.

"Heero's okay, right?" Quatre asked, squaring his shoulders. Under his gentle fingers, the pain ran away like frightened curs, and the itchy tight agony of massive swelling dwindled.

"Yeah, wonder-boy is fine. I didn't think it was humanly possible to kill a rampaging armitarger with a blow to the head. Those overgrown antlions burrow under the ground, they have a skull plate a hand’s breadth thick; they move around by head-banging rocks, for fuck’s sake. Which brings me back to my initial question, Barton, from which you haven't managed to distract me. I know Center is a sinkhole of weirdos, mystical heroes, mages, gimped-up technos, alternate humans and such stuff, but-"

"We don't know much about Heero," Trowa admitted slowly. "But it's likely that someone so powerful will attract unwanted attention." Duo’s face stayed poker-still. "It might be a safe bet that his presence is bringing all these magical creatures down on our heads. Or it could be just bad luck. You offend any gods lately, Maxwell?"

"Nope! I'm pure and innocent. Gods like me. Maybe Heero is a closet iconoclast. Maybe the next thing that is going to come down on our heads is a thunderbolt."

"We're not near any active or aggressive Source that I know of, and we should be at Svale's on the evening after tomorrow."

"Svale?"

"Our destination. Hopefully she can tell us exactly how much trouble Heero is going to be. Never mind, you'll have gone your own way by then."

"Me?" Duo hissed and glanced down at Quatre. "Watch it there, blondie, or else break out the liquor...Well, I don't know, maybe I'll hang out with you guys for awhile. I'm sick and tired of these mountains, I could do with a break."

He glanced away from an apologetic Quatre to gage Barton’s reaction. Had that been a slight weighing look in that one green eye? Duo voluntarily let his eyes flit in Heero’s direction, a faint flush artfully tainting his cheeks. When he looked back, Trowa had stood up and was heading towards the injured horse. Duo forced himself to relax. His frequent flirting with Heero had laid the groundwork for his continued presence at their side - even if it’d been completely and utterly fruitless in attracting Heero’s attention. Pity, he’d have liked possible leverage to detach Heero from that all-too-perspicacious shaman. But for now he could at least tag along, still concealed. 

From deep inside, from the choir eternal, hisses and howls echoed, bloodied suggestions of control and of loose ends severed. Duo ignored them with the same practice with which he ignored injuries. There was a time and a place for homicide, paranoia and mayhem, and there was a time to play it cool. With a power like Heero on the line, ‘cool’ was definitely the way to go forward for now. 

 

The sun was falling towards the Regio mountains behind them as they followed the road that curled through the foothills. They'd encountered no further problems and had made good time (Duo had decided to give them a break. An armitarger, imp? Stone and bone, tone it down a bit! Or give a fellow some warning next time.)

They left the road at a stone marker, worn and beaten down to a stub by time. Trowa led them through rolling grass hills for several hours, until one hill in particular reared above the rest.

Duo's steps faltered as he caught sight of the ruins crowning the perfectly round height. Gray stone peppered it, fell like organic waves around a few central buildings which were more or less intact. Around the central hill, smaller mounds reared around cirques or circles of no-longer-standing stones. 

"What is that?" he asked, though he knew, as would anyone with connections to the arcane. 

"Don't worry, it's been deactivated. Pretty much. Svale knows what she's doing. Most of the time." Trowa led them unerringly to the outskirts of the outer circle of stone menhirs, skirting the whole precinct like the posts of a three-mile-long garden fence for giants.

Duo looked around carefully, but the place did seem dead. The stone circle was at any rate. He could feel a distant Source like a dim heartbeat rustle far beneath the hill. Duo scratched his head. A dormant Source under an ancient Jishin sanctuary. Who the hell was Svale?

"Trowa! Rabbit! You're back!"

Duo nearly dove out of the sanctuary’s circle again, and Heero dropped down in a defensive crouch. The voice was a screechy wheeze just above their heads.

A-...Duo looked closely, yes, it was human- a tiny crone, about thigh-high to Quatre, was leaning on a staff over twice her height as she perched on top of one of the stone markers around the sanctuary.

"Svale." Trowa looked up with a smile. "We found what was at the end of your line. It’s been quite the journey." 

Duo, skittish, jabbed a hard look at the Nightwalker’s back, but there was no hint of any subtext there. 

"Well then, come on in!" The old woman leapt off the stone with the agility of a goat, long silvery hair floating out behind her. She dashed along the ground like she was on wheels beneath the black garment that covered her to her toes. The staff marked her progress as she disappeared among the fallen stones in the direction of the house.

Duo fell hesitantly in step with a grinning Quatre.

"Er, what is that?"

"That's Svale. You'll get used to her."

"Um...‘Rabbit’?"

Quatre's grin widened. "My name is Quatre Raberba Winner. But Svale will make a bee-line for the most embarrassing part of any person's name or habits and stake a claim on it. As I said, you'll get used to it. I don't know what she'll call you." He snickered as if he could make a few guesses.

"She called your boyfriend Trowa," Duo pointed out, not sure he was liking this.

"Yes, but they have been friends for many years. He's older than he looks." Quatre shrugged.

"I'm pretty sure she's not older than she looks," Duo muttered, remembering his brief glimpse of a face that was not so much wrinkled as ravined. "Center’s not that old."

"Duo-" Quatre's gentle reproof was interrupted by their arrival at the door of one of the smaller buildings. It had been an entrance hall to the inner sanctuary once, but had been worn down and then considerably shored up by beams of wood and mortared bricks and stone, until it had lost its fluid organic lines and looked like a run-down shack. Firelight cheerfully waved at them from the interior, and a smell of stew invited them in.

"So, what have we here?" Svale reappeared as they settled around a table of rough-hewn logs. The rest of the furniture was equally primitive, and the air smelled of cabbage and mulch. Considering the locale, Duo hadn’t expected a super computer to be lurking in the hut, but looking at the straw pallet visible behind a doorless entrance to the next room, he hoped he’d be able to unroll his bedroll beneath the vardo again rather than be expected to sleep in here. 

Svale didn’t sit down, she was peering at her guests. "What did you find at the end of the line? And why'd you bring back a couple of hotties?" Duo found himself pinned to his seat by a beady black eye. Hottie...? Must be some kind of local dialect.

"We found Heero here. I'll give you the details later," Trowa said easily.

"Hmmm." Svale scuttled over to where Heero was sitting. She circled around him as he sat stiffly in his chair without any trace of curiosity or embarrassment on his handsome face.

"Cute!" Svale finally concluded. "What is he?"

There was a short silence.

"We were hoping you could tell us, old woman," Trowa said patiently.

"Oh right, why didn't you say so!" The crone bounced onto the table as if she were on springs - amazingly agile for such a relic - and leaned forward until her nose was almost touching Heero's, who looked back calmly.

"Hmmm," Svale muttered, looking into Heero's eyes for a long moment. "Ve-ry interesting... "

"Yes?" Quatre asked breathlessly. Duo forced himself to not appear to be listening too intently, but he was all ears. A lot hinged on the information he might get in a few seconds.

"His peepers are not actually blue, more of dark gray shot through with teal and bit of light purple."

Silence. Trowa sighed.

"Anything else?" Quatre asked patiently.

"Hmmm." Svale leaned forward and prodded Heero's arm. She muttered under her breath. She made an imperative movement with her finger. "Come up here and sit on the table, junior. Here on the edge."

Heero obeyed without question.

"Right." Svale walked around him on the table, carelessly kicking an empty cup out of the way. Duo's hand shot out and snagged it automatically. He thought he caught the slightest glint from Svale's eyes in his direction, but she seemed perfectly concentrated on Heero.

"Hmmm." She prodded Heero in the waist, leaned to put a wrinkled ear on his back and listened to his heart for a minute. Then she scampered to the edge of the table, hoisted her staff and brought the end to rap sharply against his knee.

Four pairs of eyes concentrated on Heero's complete lack of leg movement. Heero's eyes were on Svale and he was beginning to frown.

"Hmf!"

Quatre’s hand jerked up in warning- Svale lifted her staff again and brought it with a full-strength crack against Heero's knee.

No-one noticed if Heero's knee actually moved since his lightning punch propelled the old crone full-force against a nearby wall, which promptly collapsed in a rain of bricks and old mortar.

" _Fuck!_ " Duo surged to his feet. "Fuck, Heero! You just killed the old woman! Trowa! Quatre! Heero just killed the old-"

Quatre was struggling to rise, worried, while Trowa was holding him back with a resigned look on his face.

" _Hotcha!_ Now that is what I call a _man!_ "

Duo spun to look at the heaving, shaking pile of various masonry. The staff shot up through the debris, then Svale jumped out, showering dust and bits of stone into the living quarters. She shook her head and grinned toothlessly, like something buried in a pyramid for many centuries. Heero stared back with slightly widened eyes.

"Junior, I don't know who the hell you are, but if I was a hundred years younger, I sure know where you'd be spending the night! Hooya!"

"Svale, if you were a hundred years younger, you'd be four hundred and sixty... nine." Trowa said, eyes flickering briefly in concentration.

"And your point is?" Svale dug some mortar out of a wrinkled ear and scooted back over to where they were sitting. The hole now leading from her kitchen to her bedroom didn’t seem to concern her. Duo made a strangled noise at the bottom of his throat.

"Ah, who's the other cutie?" Svale leapt up on the table again, ignoring a glowering Heero. Trowa snagged an arm across the corner of the table and forced Duo back in his seat before the braided man could make a run for it.

"This is Duo Maxwell. We ran into him in near the Reg. He guided us through the mountains."

A wrinkled old face and a yellowy eye invaded his vision. Svale smelled of old parchment and young cheese. "Wow, he's even cuter than the other one. Trowa, what are you trying to do, give an elderly lady a heart attack?"

Trowa sighed again and shifted his hold until he was leaning full force against Duo.

"Hey there, kid!" Duo fought against Trowa's hold with a nervous 'whoa!' as Svale leapt on to his lap. "You know, I might live in a hovel, but I'm actually pretty rich! Wanna marry me?"

"Trowa-a!" Duo mewed as he squirmed. The old witch was pinching him in the waist and seemed intent on heading south.

"Svale, be polite," Trowa said calmly. Svale grabbed Duo's chin with wiry fingers and turned it this way and that. He didn't like it, but preferred her hold there than on whatever previous destination she had in mind for her hands before. She did the mummy grin again.

"Lovely, just lovely. Please tell me this is a present for your old friend Svale, Trowa my love?"

"No, he's just someone who's been helping us," Trowa said, now standing to keep Duo in place. Besides him, Quatre was laughing helplessly.

"Ma'am-" Duo started.

"Oh, and so polite too!" Duo recoiled as a wrinkled digit pinched his nose - and another one, hidden from Trowa, pinched him on the chest in an area that was bound to make him celibate for the foreseeable future. The more polite hand dropped to the thongs holding his black leather vest closed and gave them a hopeful tug. "You didn't answer my question, junior. Want to make a woman really happy? More importantly, think you have the stamina for it?"

"Aren't you supposed to be concentrating on Heero?" Duo tried to keep his voice from quaking as he fought off the ruder hand. He realized he was blushing furiously, something that hadn't happened involuntarily for a long time. "He's the one Trowa found, I'm just an ordinary-"

"Nothing ordinary about a fine stud like you, boy! I think I'll keep him, Trowa. Can I please keep him? Please?" Svale's hands dropped his vest's laces and darted to the thong around his forehead. "I'll call him Maxie and he can sleep in my bed! Can I-"

Duo surged to his feet with a hiss like an angry cat, swatting Svale's hands away so hard the old biddy fell off the table. Trowa staggered as muscles he didn't know the young man had arched against his hold and shouldered him away.

" _Hands off, lady!_ " Duo took a few steps back, forearms raised in defense but at an angle where one twitch would unfurl power-

"Lady?" Svale hopped back onto her feet completely unharmed. "Lady?? I'm in love! No-one's called me that since-"

Trowa caught her in mid-air, picking her out of her intended Duo-full-body-tackle. "Okay, that's enough, old woman. Leave Duo alone."

"Duo? Duo! Duo! Even his name is cute!"

"Whatever. Why don't you give us something to eat, then put your overactive libido to bed - _alone_ \- and let the younger generation get some rest. We've had a tough trip."

Duo, who would have preferred the armitarger at this point, settled his clothes again and wondered if it wasn't too late to head back to the mountains. Not that he could leave Heero behind. No, he needed him too much. But damn, this wasn't going to be fun!

 

Next Chapter: Three Interludes

In which people reflect, and a beautiful, angry Dragon kills a lot of people (not nice people, however, so that’s okay)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahhh, Svale. Svale and the Zero!Quatre storyline is what made me pick up this fic again. Zero!Quatre is challenging and interesting to write. Svale is just fun :D Especially when you know that her shenanigans are either a joke or a way of getting into people’s heads. Svale is actually considerably older than 569 and not exactly entirely human per se. As such, if anybody ever actually took her up her flirtatious suggestions, she’d be forced to backpedal at speed :) 
> 
> If Heero’s reaction seems a bit over the top...yes, it would be if she was normal. However, Heero can see things in a way most people cannot. He knows more of Svale’s true nature than even Trowa does, so he knew his punch wouldn’t harm her. He did think it would get her to back off, which tells us that Heero is perceptive but in no way omniscient :D


	6. Three Interludes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short chapter that goes with the previous one, so posting them together.

Interlude: Dragon.

 

Terrifying beauty...

It was the only words that came to Quinze's mind as the last of his men fell to the ground in a boneless heap.

"Right." The young man glanced around, tallying the bodies, then he walked over to where Quinze was propped against a wall; with two broken legs, it wasn't like the latter had any other option. The man crouched before the fallen leader until their eyes were at the same height.

"Now, all I want to do is ask you a question. I want-"

"What?" Quinze wheezed. "You just wanted to ask me a question?"

"Yes."

"But why-" Quinze made a small - and prudent - gesture around them. Five minutes ago, before this young man had walked in, greeted them and attacked head on, Quinze had been the proud commander of a group of mercenaries renowned for their fighting skills (though not for their mercy or their habit of leaving people alive behind them). The White Fang was now just a series of corpses scattered around the barracks.

"That?" One last glance dismissed the bodies around them. "Efficiency."

"What?!"

"I wanted to save time. I was going to ask you a question. You were going to refuse to answer. You were going to be rude, then sic your men on me. I was going to kill them, then ask my question again, and this time you were going to answer to avoid retaliation. So I thought I would save time for everybody concerned and skip forward to the part where you answer my question to avoid getting slowly ripped limb from limb."

"I wouldn't have attacked you," Quinze said, though he was probably lying and they both knew it.

"Yes, you were."

"Wh-why?"

"Because of the question. You would have realized that after you answered, I was going to kill you all anyway."

"...Why?"

"Because I believe in justice for anyone who insults my people, and I believe in exterminating thieving rodents, and by a happy coincidence, you happen to be both."

Quinze licked his lips. "What's your question?" He was beginning to suspect he knew.

The young man smiled, a slight movement of the mouth which made his face so exquisite it almost distracted the mercenary.

"Where's Wing?"

Quinze swallowed. "...I thought you were all dead. I thought Jusan-"

The lips twitched. A definite warning.

Quinze's mouth twisted into a caricature of a smile.

"I know where it is, yeah, but we don't have it anymore. I'll tell you where to find it, but you have to give me your word that you will let me go."

Every so slightly, the man shook his head.

"Why-why should I tell you then?"

The black eyes fastened on his, then dropped to his broken legs.

The Dragon smiled.

"If I tell you, will you kill me quickly?" Quinze's voice was a hollow whisper.

A moment of stillness, then the dark head nodded once.

Quinze's lips twisted. "I sold it to someone on Center. I don't know who he was exactly, except that he was very rich, and pretty scary for someone so young. He- "

The young man straightened and took a step back. Quinze licked his lips, the rasp magnified by the fact that it would probably be the last pleasant sensation in his life. "Don't you want to hear how to find it?" he asked, trying to prolong his existence by whatever scant seconds he could.

"Wing is on Center. I can find it with Shenlong." The young man extended a hand, palm down, as if to demonstrate. Something clicked and rustled, and a curl of metal danced around the arm, delicate twining vines of wire fastening on it and twisting up to the wrist, before gathering above the hand and blooming into a small flower shaped like the muzzle of a gun.

"Beautiful... " Quinze whispered, before the shot rang out.

 

 

 

Interlude: Crone

 

Svale was sitting on the apex of the old sanctuary roof, watching the moon sailing high above. A bottle and a small cup were being put to good use.

She didn't glance around at the slight noise behind her, as Trowa clambered up onto the roof.

"We safe here?"

"Hmm-m." Svale's wrinkled head bobbed several times. "I reinforced all the wards. Besides, they're all asleep. Including Rabbit, now. You ride that boy hard, Trowa!" She burst into a cheesy cackle.

"Svale, I asked you before not to spy on us." Trowa's voice was merely weary as he sat besides her.

"Sure, remove one of life's last pleasures for this old lady."

"Please get your hand off of my knee."

"Can I put it here instead?"

"No."

"...No fun. I can't even curl up next to one of those studs you brought back."

"Heero might actually find a way of hurting you if you provoke him too much. And Duo...he might as well. So?"

"I can't tell you anything about Heero, and I doubt I'll be able to even after you tell me the rest of the tale." Svale swirled the liquid around the ceramic cup. Some of it splashed and started foaming and eating through the ancient gray stone. "It's like looking into the ocean, trying to see a glass of water. No doubt it's what we were supposed to find. But bugger me with a broom if I know what it is exactly. I'll examine him a bit better over the next few days."

"Watch out for that right hook," Trowa murmured, only partly joking.

"I'll see if I can tell you more by next full moon. Give you a direction to Walk in for further answers."

"What can you tell me about Duo?"

Yellowy old eyes narrowed as they glanced at him. "He's beautiful enough to break my heart?"

"More precisely."

"Why should there be more to say?" Svale hedged.

Trowa was silent for a moment.

"Well? Why's he got your breeches riding up your backside? You didn't see anything when you Walked his lines or you'd have shaken him off, not brought him back here."

"Correct."

"So? Animal instinct?"

"No, that I trust. It's rather a kind of logic, which I trust a whole lot less," Trowa said dryly. "He was in a strange mess when we found him, and we've been in trouble since then, though I can't see how it could be his fault. He's seen Heero in all his glory, he knows I'm a Nightwalker, he’s met you, and he's not run away screaming yet. Instead he seems intent on sticking it out with us, despite your little display this evening. What can you tell me about him?"

"He's nice, he's young, he's cute. He's got reflexes and strength, more than he's showing. He could be hiding something, but I can't tell you what or if he's truly dangerous or not." Svale looked suddenly serious and thoughtful. "I'd say...watch him, Trowa, my boy. There is something there...but be it hidden talent or hidden danger, I'm not sure." The look passed as she swallowed some more alcohol and her eyes crossed. "I can get rid of him for you, if you want."

Trowa stiffened. "What...did you have in mind?"

"Well, if he found me snuggled up in bed with him in the altogether-"

"Oh right. Well, we'll resort to extreme measures if we need to. In the meantime, we'll take him at face value; he's just an overly curious, adrenaline-seeking young man with the hots for Heero and an above average resistance to crazy adventures and lecherous old ladies. He's fast, he's smart, he knows his way around this whole region, he might be useful."

"You mean I can keep him?!"

"No, Svale-" Trowa's patient words trickled out under the moonlight. Five minutes later, he was lifting Svale's hand from his knee again.

 

 

Interlude: Shinigami

 

Perched high up on the tallest ley-stone and cloaked in night, Duo listened to the conversation between the Nightwalker and the crone with some embarrassment. Damn, he'd been right in his conclusions (the ones he'd drawn later, on reflection, not while Svale was pawing him): it had been some sort of test. And he'd almost failed. He'd nearly sent the old lech catapulting into orbit when she grabbed at his headband, and he would have fried her if she'd gone for his third eye chakra. Which would have been the next logical target if she was trying to probe him for power, and he should have been ready for it. Six years of deep cover and _this_ was what made him screw up? Screams of scorn were echoing around the darker places of his mind, but then again she’d caught everyone flatfooted and no wonder.

Duo shook his head. Trowa was more on the ball then he thought - and so was the old goat for that matter. He couldn't underestimate either of them. Fortunately they were still far off track as far as he was concerned. If he was careful, they wouldn't get any nearer. In fact, he - they could all - use Svale, now that they realized her place in the scheme of things.

He slowly backed out from her wards. They were really quite good, just not quite good enough. As he started to teleport, he heard her voice drifting on the wind, something about giving Heero a thorough physical examination tomorrow.

Duo's lips curled in a smile of cruel amusement. Well, well, well, something to look forward to then. He teleported out to find Imp and see what could be done to make things even more interesting in the days to come.

 

 

 

Next chapter: Sanctuary

Crones go flying and Duo connects some dots.


	7. Sanctuary

"YaaAAAaaa-" Crash!

Duo gulped as he realized Svale had hurtled past him at head height a few inches away from his nose, shot out the door of her hovel at speeds that matched artillery fire. Apparently, Heero's physical examination was going pretty much as expected.

The man himself appeared in the doorway. Despite the risk, Duo couldn't stop the widest of grins crawling onto his face as he realized Heero was scowling and rubbing a buttock.

"Whatsa matter, buddy, did the old geezer pinch you?"

"Yes," Heero muttered, glaring around the gray stones and the overcast morning mists for his attacker.

"Well, watch where you toss her next time. You almost croned me."

Heero gave him a sour look and stalked off. Duo thought he would die when he saw Heero casting a wary eye around him as he walked. So he was human after all!

"Hooo-yaaa..." The noise was coming from the stabling area across from the house. Duo wandered over and looked down at the pile of broken wood and old straw. Fortunately Trowa had taken the horses out that morning for a bit of exercise and good green marshland grass. He’d have to rebuild their stalls when he got back. 

"That boy is just tooooo fine! I only wish I _was_ a hundred years younger, at least I'd have a chance of-"

"-getting yourself killed, Svale. Heero's too tough for you. And I-" Duo added as he dodged a wandering hand that reached for him from under the pile "- am way too fast and not that easy. Give it up, relic."

Svale's head popped up through the broken horse stall where she'd landed. "Relic? What happened to the polite and lovely young man who was begging me to marry him last night?"

"He vanished when you woke up?" Duo sniggered. 

Svale gave him a long look, then grinned. Something of a truce was declared.

Duo picked Svale up by the scruff of her black gown, set her on her feet, then fished around the broken stall for her staff. Svale was picking splinters out of her garment, but was otherwise completely unharmed. Duo made a mental note to check out the apparent invulnerability of his hostess. Despite the presence of a source under their feet, he didn't think she was a goddess. Or if she was...then he was well down the path to atheism, Nai No Kami spare him.

"Thank you, handsome!" Svale chirped as he handed her the staff (taking a few seconds to check it out for any magical properties). "Now, where'd that fine young man go? I've still got lots to examine. I hadn't even gotten to the interesting parts yet!"

"You know no fear, do you." Duo didn't have to feign reluctant respect.

"Life's too short!"

"I thought you were over five-hundred-"

The staff whipped down with the speed of a striking cobra and rapped him on the head. "And yours will be a lot shorter if you start talking about a lady's age."

"I was talking about _your_ age," Duo muttered, rubbing his head. He ran after Svale and fell in step with her as she hunted for Heero.

"I couldn't help notice your interesting digs, Svale. Most people will run a mile rather than spend a minute in a place like this."

"Most people are idiots," Svale grunted.

"Is this some kind of ancient temple? It looks old," Duo fished.

"It is. Drat!" Svale leapt up on to the rim of the well in the center of the circle of abandoned ruins, trying to spot Heero. "One tiny pinch and he runs off like a frightened virgin. Bet he is one, too."

That almost distracted Duo, but he rammed his thoughts back to where they were supposed to be. "What was it used for?"

"What? What are you talking about? Do you see him, Maxie?"

"This place, what-" Svale hopped up to the well's roof, then planted her staff in between two tiles and swarmed up its length to get even more height, perching precariously on the knob.

Duo sighed. Okay. Time for the big guns.

"I wouldn’t bother, Svale. I don't think Heero is interested. After all, he turned _me_ down..."

Duo heaved a big sigh, then stretched languorously and brought a hand ghosting up his chest to rub his neck slowly as he arched his back, his braid echoing the movement with a gentle pendulum sway.

When he opened his eyes, Svale was still perched on her staff but it was now at ground level and she was at face height, staring at him.

"Okay, Maxie, you have my attention. What were you asking?"

Duo inspected the tip of one black glove with a slight pout, long lashes fluttering as he half-closed his eyes. "Just curious about you, Svale, I don't know many people who would be brave enough to live in an abandoned temple like this."

"Don't lay it on too thick, kid, I was doing this before you were even a glint in your great-great-great-grandfather's eye," Svale muttered. Though of course she _was_ listening now.

"Temple?" prompted Duo, spinning on his heels and walking to the nearest intact cirque, with a swing of hips and braid.

"What, you never seen a Jishin sanctuary before, boy?" Svale followed him to the rounded archway. There wasn't a straight line in the entire original structure, it all curled and blossomed in an organic dance of stone.

"Ji-what?" Duo asked lazily, wandering into the inner cirque -what was left of it- and walking around the spot where the hearthstone would have been a long time ago. The open-air circular area was loosely surrounded by several walls at waist-height, some connecting and others not, weaving in and out and around it like a maze. Some were decorated with words and texts, delicate flowing strokes lost in the shadows of the gloomy morning.

"Jishin," Svale barked. "The Ancients, the Elsire, the Tricksters, the twilight folk."

"Oh, them. I thought that was just legends."

"Bull, boy! What do they teach you in school nowadays? The Jishin were real."

"Were real? So they’re not around any more.”

"Yeah, gone ages ago, leaving their places of power one by one. Their final death knell however...” 

Duo glanced around in surprise at the unexpected tone of sadness in Svale’s voice. 

"So, this was what, a temple to one of their gods?"

"They didn't build temples to their gods. They didn't so much worship their deities as argue with them constantly. This isn't a temple, it's something else."

"What is it?" Duo asked casually. He'd spent most of the night exploring the sanctuary. The place was huge, most of it underground. The Source beneath it had preserved it’s magical lines, but it was still badly damaged by time, and he didn't have the means to examine the buried sections. It looked like an ordinary sanctuary, however old and decrepit, though inner echoes from a far distant crypt were hinting at possibilities and he was beginning to wonder if...

"I don't know, really." Duo glanced at her sharply, but Svale was glaring at the walls full of ancient exotic script as if it insulted her, and seemed to be telling the truth.

"I thought Quatre said you lived here to study the place."

"Hmf, yeah, I study a lot of Jishin arcana. But this place...I need a key to get into the important bits. I thought I had it a couple of years ago. Some old fool dug it up from his library."

Duo's ears pricked. "And?"

"And before the old bugger could sell it to me, that bloody Shinigami went and stole it!" Svale's staff crashed against the old rock floor with a vengeance.

Duo's face was carefully blank, but he suddenly wanted to be elsewhere very quickly. "Oh, what a shame."

"I should say! Devious scheming little rat! I don't know what he wants all that magic stuff for, but he's been the bane of the arcane community for the past five years or more." The staff ground into rock with a furious crish-crish-crish sound.

"Yeah, sounds like a real bastard. I've just remembered something I've got to do, Svale." Duo headed towards the exit, vaulting over a low wall in the process. "I'll be back-"

Svale appeared before him so quickly he thought she'd teleported into place. The staff and a twitching withered hand were barring his exit. She had a greasy smile on her mug, but her eyes were keen and curious. "Whoa, not so fast, Maxie. Old Svale can tell you a lot more about the Jishin, you know, I've been studying them for years. Was there anything in particular you wanted to know?”

“What? No-“

“Why don't I sit on your knee and tell you all about it. Ask any question you want."

"That'd be great, Svale," Duo said, trying to fend the hand away. "But I'm not all that- I really have to-"

"It can't be more important than learning, boy! You young people these days, you have no attention span, no concentration, no-"

"Oh look, there's Heero."

" _Where!?_ "

"Just went around that menhir over there."

"See you later, Maxie. Heeeee-ro! Sweeeetie!"

Duo shook his head and made good his escape.

 

Five minutes later and ten miles away, Imp, who was peacefully sleeping on its master's bag in their new hide-out, found itself catapulted into the air and crashing to the ground in a little black and gray heap.

"M-master?" it ground out, staring upside down at Duo rooting through the bag.

"Stupid! Stupid stupid stupid- **Stupid!** Iee - **Blind fool!** -Ee, ima!- **Where-... where-** "

"Duo!"

Duo blinked at Imp hovering a few inches from his nose.

"Wh-"

"Calm down," Imp hissed. "Master Duo," it added, once it saw what it needed in its master's eyes.

Duo sighed. He calmly reached into the bag and pulled out a small book. The cover looked like petrified wood and was inset with a red gem that could be detached with a spell and a twist. The pages were so thin they were almost transparent, but made from an enchanted silicate material that Duo knew to be nearly indestructible. He opened it, sinking to sit on the ground.

" **Idiot...** " he muttered one more time, but it sounded like his normal voice even though the word still curled in an ancient tongue of power and magic that only a dozen people left on Center would be able to understand. He flipped a few pages and scowled. "I knew it was a key- but the book said it was for a weapon. All these spells are offensive- but they depend on a conditional arcana I didn’t understand and I thought-...I spent six months with that Sweeper crew going all the way out to the Oort cloud to see if I could find some kind of doomsday device, and it was right here all the time, smack in the center of bloody Center. The Guardian node in the original sanctuary. Some of them were trying to tell me...but I...I was looking for a weapon...Too much useless knowledge, Imp. Too... much..." His head slowly sank to his raised knees, curling around the book in his lap, his shoulders drooping.

Imp hesitated and fluttered over to his side. When Duo didn't move, it grabbed the end of his braid and awkwardly smoothed the hair escaping from the thong.

Duo sighed after awhile. "Don't be too nice to me, Imp,” he muttered. "You know it brings out my worst side." But Imp knew the bad side and the worst side well, it could tell they weren’t nearby anymore. It gave its master’s braid one last pat and then put it down and waited for Duo to speak.

When Duo lifted his head, his eyes were gleaming and Imp felt relieved. Its master was back.

"I've just thought of something completely and utterly nasty and devious that will get me several things I want, and I’ll barely have to lift a finger." Duo's manic smile had returned. It was decidedly unpleasant and Imp was glad it wasn't the intended recipient.

Someone was about to meet Shi No Kami.

 

Next chapter: Intersections Part 1

There is a reason Svale calls him ‘Rabbit’.


	8. Intersections, Part I

Quatre bit his lip hesitantly as he looked around. He could hear Svale off in the distance, yelling at Heero to open his door. She'd been at it for a week, you'd think she'd give up. Duo was nowhere to be seen, he often disappeared, or spent a good part of the day sleeping. 

It just wouldn't do. 

He picked up the things he'd gathered, the small sickle, the herbuary, the basket with solvents and pots, some food, some water...the _other_ small pot and the blanket...Quatre darted across the courtyard and into the stable, looking around him carefully, especially eager to escape Svale's keen gaze.

He just couldn't get it out of his head...

Full moon last night. As the shadows lengthened in the hushed breeze of evening, Quatre had seen him through the window of their room. Trowa had been washing his face with water from the well. He'd straightened up as the first ghost of moonlight stretched a finger out across the twilight. Tall, straight, slender yet so strong. Dressed in leather, dusk and moonlight. A mixture of dark and light brown, russet shirt, leather jerkin knotted around a wiry chest, that hair cascading down his face, unrestrained by the brown leather headband beneath it, knotted in the back, two small beads dangling at different lengths from the leather thongs...The shaman had stretched, leaning his body into the rising moonlight, then he’d closed his eyes and walked away towards the wild hills around them. He'd been out there all night.

Quatre knew he had...trouble with physical intimacy. Well, not the intimacy part, really, he just had to wade through a life’s worth of hold-ups and shyness and embarrassment to get there. Though more than the getting there, it was currently the lack of intimacy whatsoever that was fast becoming the critical problem. Since Trowa had come back from his Walk with a naked Heero wrapped in his cloak over a month ago, they'd manage to make love three times, and each time they'd been disturbed, either during the act or by sly comments afterwards. Heero had actually been alright in retrospect. Duo had been impossible, making odious jokes after he'd overheard them. As for Svale...whatever had let Quatre forget the old hag had the entire sanctuary as an extra pair of ears that first night they'd arrived? The relief at being safe and the road through the Regio range behind them had allowed it to slip his mind, but she’d been sure to remind him the next day. 

Quatre saddled the roan horse. Trowa had no need to name animals, and Quatre was only interested in humans, so they were the roan horse and the stupid horse respectively. He led her from her stall and away from the circle of stone.

It just wouldn't do at all...

He lightly climbed the docile beast and allowed his mind to wander as he shook the reins, letting another sense guide him. He didn't need to be precise. He'd be found long before he could get close enough to worry about better directions.

 

Quatre closed the pot on a few herbs he'd picked. The hilly moors around the sanctuary were not all that rich in curative plants. Maybe some roots-...who was he fooling? He was kneeling on a thick blanket laid on the packed sod in the dip between two hills, the fresh herbal scent wafting from the other little pot could be smelled a mile off by the one who was approaching, and Quatre was already blushing to the roots of his hair.

No sound of footstep behind him. He didn't need any. His heart was a single string, beating to the rhythm of his pulse - somewhat faster now - until someone else came near and then the string began to sway and twitch with another's soul-beat superimposed. It had taken him so long, as he grew up, to understand his gift, to distinguish his melody from that of others. And for one man, he didn't know the difference. There was no difference.

So he knew what his other soul wanted, the way he wanted it, and so Quatre wanted it too.

He put the useless herbs down and without turning drew off the thick cotton smock he wore. Then he pulled off his shoes, belt and trousers as if stripping out in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason was something he did every day. Soft fair skin was a gentle counterpoint to the gray skies and rugged brown hills around him. A wind, wet and fairly cold, tousled blond hair and made him shiver. He put the pot within easy reach and leaned forward to get some food from the basket.

He didn't even tense as the other body folded over his. Rough leather scratched his back and he gasped at the sensation against his cold skin and at the sudden throb of emotions the contact reinforced.

 _Mine_.

He didn't try to turn, but arched against the body until they were as much in contact as possible. _Yours_.

The warmth left him briefly, though legs were still in contact with his, as he heard the jerkin and shirt being hastily pulled away, the crossbow and belt laden with bolts clunking to the ground. The next contact was the delectable tingle of skin on skin, slowly sliding over him again, leaving him breathless. A hand reached past him towards the pot, the little lid flipped onto the blanket in haste. But the first move into him was gentle. Trowa had never hurt him.

The warm presence covered him with just enough weight to hold him still and warm. He gasped as the gentle finger explored, caressed, while the other hand lingered over his chest, brushing nipples, stomach, sides, petting him and soothing him like one of the animal guides the shaman ran with during the nights of the full moon. He leaned into that gentle touch, on hands and knees, fingers kneading the thick blanket. The body above his followed his every movement. 

He wasn't cold anymore.

A second gentle intrusion, a third, the hand on his body became rougher, more urgent, curling in his hair, around the back of his neck, across his chest. Quatre stiffened as the teasing, kneading fingers caressed a little ball of sensation deep inside, and he found himself surging back to get more of those little gasps of breathless tingling pleasure shooting up his spine and down his groin. He didn't say anything though. When he was ready, he merely shoved back harder, hips twisting slightly, and a little mewling noise escaped him, demanding.

The response was immediate and fierce, as his lover's member replaced the fingers in a slow, unhesitant thrust. Quatre writhed against the hard chest, rocking back on his knees slightly to make the entrance easier. He shuddered, his whole body feeling like a fluttering pulse as he leaned back slowly until Trowa was fully within him.

Strong hands bent him forward again and traveled down his arms, the leather wristband rasping against his fair skin, until his smaller hands were anchored into the blanket. Strong corded fingers slipped beneath his so his weight leaned on them, and he twined them with his own. Two beaded thongs fell onto his shoulder, slipped into the dip of his neck, cold sharp contact of glass against skin. He twitched his hips back, every nerve singing at the feeling of even greater contact between them, bridging the gap, mind to body, filling him to the brink.

The shaman moved his legs until he was crouched over Quatre, and the blond felt lips on his neck, a gentle stroke, as the taller man flexed hips back and forth, slowly. Quatre licked open lips as he panted, every move a new sensation touching a small bundle of intensity in his chest and crotch. No hands had lingered over the later. Most times the joinings were different, but when Trowa was this close to the full moon another instinct drove him, and Quatre gave what was needed. Today his mate's pleasure came first, the claiming came first. He made no more than a small noise at the back of his throat as the shaman took control of the rhythm of their movements and increased the intensity ruthlessly.

The sex was fierce and silent. Quatre swallowed groans and shouts, until they gathered deep in his chest, more a vibration than a cry, sending shivers of pleasure and lust to the skin rubbing back and forth against his spine. Finally a groan above him as the rhythm became wild, primal, and lips and teeth fastened gently onto the skin of his neck. The kick inside, exploding when his lover's wild thrusts hit their mark, was making him pant open mouthed, arching back against Trowa, and it blended with the roaring throb of love, lust and pleasure seeping from his lover's mind and into his own, running wild hands over the pulse-string in his chest. Quatre almost came as the feelings rose to a fever pitch, melting in the crucible to one white-hot moment of passion, mind and body convulsing as one.

A gasp in his ear as the teeth left their soft grip on his neck, and waves of warmth, inside and out made all his skin ache for further touch. Trowa panted behind him, arms rising to gently caress, hold and cherish. No need for words. All that could ever be said, an entire elegy, in one embrace.

Quatre could feel a sensual smile form against his shoulder as his lover withdrew, and the touches were no longer shared, they were all for him. Quatre twitched, sensitive skin suddenly ticklish, and a low laugh brushed his hair at the nape of the neck. He was suddenly lifted - a small startled gasp- and tumbled around onto the blanket, and he was staring up into a knowing green eye. A gentle teasing brush of lips against lips before they dropped to his throat, drinking a bead of sweat before the wind could cool it. Quatre caught his breath in anticipation.

Their way of making love was as different as they were. Quatre knew only how to give, and throbbed in the echoes of offered pleasure. Trowa couldn't read his mind, didn't know what Quatre wanted, and in a way, neither did the younger, more inexperienced man. But the shaman focused his own powers, following the lines of the body he knew so well, to see where the greatest source of pleasure could be at that moment, hunting it down and tracking it like a wild animal spirit. Quatre shuddered with lust and anticipation. Where would it be lurking today...?

Lips ghosted over his chest, his belly, down further, circling his erection and then a soft touch of fingers and tongue caressed it up, then down, then-

Quatre blinked at the ebb of pleasure. He glanced down, trying to focus on his lover. Trowa's head was down but tilted, his eyes -the green one and the one touched by the moon- focusing elsewhere. Then his face hardened.

"Get dressed."

Quatre stiffened, then flew for his clothes, checking his curved knife in his belt first. Behind him, he heard Trowa pull on pants and belt but he didn't reach for his shirt. He heard instead the ratchet of the crossbow being pulled back and the double click of two bolts being fit in. His lover's soul was as calm and still as the hills around them, and now Quatre could feel the slightest niggling of intrusive feelings closing around them. Still a good distance away, but-

"I think we're about to have company, boys!"

Quatre yelled as he spun around, and Trowa twitched his crossbow.

"Svale!"

For an instant Quatre forgot the twinges of danger closing in as he glared at the old hag. "I can't _believe_ it, you _followed_ me-"

Trowa hissed in warning. As Quatre strangled his cries he could hear and feel the hunters approaching.

 

Next chapter: Intersections Part 2  
Next time, more pillow-talk, less killing, _if_ you don’t mind.


	9. Intersections, Part II

Trowa tilted his head. In his mind’s eye, his lines of fate and vectors of action branched out from the small clearing Quatre had selected, and intersected those of others. Eight others.

"Svale, do you think you can circle them and make it back to the sanctuary?"

"I doubt it, my boy, not at the speed they must be capable of if they managed to get the drop on us. Looks like we’re going to have a brawl. Right out here in the middle of nowhere with no bleeding cover whatsoever. Nice place you chose, Rabbit."

"I can shield us both," Quatre said, his voice still husky but calm.

The men were closing fast. They had to have had horses to move across the hills, but they'd left them behind or Trowa would have picked up on the presence of their animals long before they got this close.

He let himself sink into the lines, reassured to feel Quatre's shield rise behind him. At least he didn't have to worry about his lover immediately.

Ah, there.

One of the lines sharpened as it intersected his.

Trowa moved, a sway to the right so that the quarrel shooting towards his hip slipped by with an inch to spare. It hit the ground thirty feet behind him, slithering with a soft rasp over the grass.

"Nice."

The man crested the hill that had protected him from sight, slipping another bolt in his crossbow. Others drew up around him at a safe distance, in a loose crescent a hundred feet in front of Trowa.

"What do you want?" But Trowa could already see the complex dance of intersecting lines, and had a feeling that negotiation wasn't going to work. The lines of men were more fluid and shifting than the immortal lines of the earth or the simple geometries of animals, but they could still be reliable when things came down to the rub.

"You." The man pointed at Svale. He was only slightly shorter than Trowa, dressed in tough black and maroon leathers, light brown hair gathered in a loose ponytail. The small sweep of beard was darker, framing and hardening a face that was otherwise too soft to be swinging crossbows at people. "Old..." he hesitated. "...lady," he finally concluded. Behind him, Trowa could feel Svale glare daggers. "A little bird told me that you were the keeper of a Jishin temple to the west of here."

"I should have been your mother's keeper instead, stopped her from humping the goat that fathered you," Svale ground out. Trowa heard Quatre protest quietly, but knew, like Svale, that being polite and cooperative was not going to lead anywhere.

The man smiled like a knife, clean and sharp. "I'll take that as a yes. We have a buyer who is very interested in Twilight artifacts. We've got some, but he wants a complete set, and we hear we can find them in your temple."

"What do you want, exactly?" Svale grumbled, eyes fixed on the leader. Trowa knew that her senses, like his, were flickering over the other men. Nothing too special. Two of them were not straight-up human, but whatever alternate ancestry they bore was not strong enough to register powerful magical or psychic lines. One of them could scrye and cast shields, he guessed, others had arcane construct shields clipped to their belts. All useless against his runed bolts. Two of them had crossbows, the others had swords or spiked clubs. They wore no armor except for reinforced leather. Quick raiders, not heavy infantry.

"We want any Jishin artifact you have. A couple of my men will take you back to the temple. I hear you have strong magic barriers around the place. We've been waiting for days for someone to come out so we could force you out of your shell, and you did us the honor of coming out in person, trailing after blondie here. But your friends' presence will still be useful. They will insure you come back out from that magical barrier with my two men and all your baubles as quickly as you can, to insure they're not damaged."

His eyes flicked over Trowa's bare chest and to Quatre, a pool of stillness in the center of his mystical shield, and the man's smile faded slightly to be replaced by a dreamy expression. "Not too damaged," he added with a murmur.

"If you're going to be messing with my boys anyway, why should I do what you say?" Svale barked.

"Trust me, you'll do it, and very quickly. The less time they spend with me and my men, the better for them."

A couple of the men chuckled.

"Who is your buyer and who gave you your information?"

The man's eyes narrowed at Trowa's light baritone. "Because I _am_ eventually going to release you alive, pretty boy, I'm not going to tell you that. You can take that as my seal that we will let you go once we get what we want."

Trowa shrugged. It was worth a try. He crouched and put the crossbow down on the ground.

"Very well, looks like we're in agreement." The leader's smile was wide and sensual, staring down at the kneeling shaman, his own crossbow dipping. His gaze lingered on the bare chest again, then he blinked as he saw Trowa tug at the thongs holding his headband tight across his forehead.

Trowa cast one glance behind him. Quatre's eyes were two warm pools of feeling, and Svale nodded. Then Trowa tugged the headband down over his eyes and jerked the thongs fast again, the two beads clicking together briefly.

"'Ere, thass nice!" one of the men drawled in a far spiral arm accent. "'E's doin' all t'work for us. Think ‘e'll gag 'imself and tie ‘is own hands too?"

The beads clicked again as Trowa fit the blindfold. He grabbed his crossbow and stood.

Lines darted and twisted around them all, and he now stepped into their world and let himself sink into them. Each attacker was reduced to an outline of vectors, lines of intent, the direction of spirit, the aim of swinging weapons, leaping out to intersect with the lines of earth and with others.

Trowa took three steps forward and to the left, instinctively putting himself at the greatest number of intersections.

"What the-" someone muttered.

"Well boys, I would gladly give you what few Jishin claptrap I've accumulated over the years, for all the good it would do your buyer, but I'm not lettin' you play your dirty games with Trowa and young Rabbit." Svale's voice rang out in an angry creak, distracting their attackers for a few seconds. "As for your informant, I hope you didn't pay him too much for his information, cause it has several gaps. There are no magical barriers around my home that would have kept you out; the only wards I have are against psychic interference. In it, I have so few Jishin artifacts it's almost a joke, since I study the sanctuary ruins, not the crap you sell to tourists. And my boys ain't good bargaining chips." Trowa was moving again, the lines and vectors brushing him as they twisted around him. There. The breaking point in the mesh of lines.

He didn't wait for an attack. His crossbow whipped towards the first knot in the lines, aiming not at the man, but at the vectors of his movements. Intersection. The second bolt had left the crossbow an instant after the first, towards the second man, then Trowa ducked the spin of lines surging towards his own.

In the visible world, his bolts hissed from his crossbow, not aiming at the men but at the spot where they had instinctively ducked as they saw him raise his bow at them, pinning first one then another of the archers even as they dodged. Then the shaman was crouched below the bolt from the leader's bow, fingers hauling back the mechanism as the shot ripped the air a finger above his head. He rolled forward, dodging the second shaft, straightened at the same time he grabbed two bolts from his hip quiver and fitted them in. He fired immediately. His bolt flew through the useless shield of the man running towards one of the fallen bows, taking him just as he lifted his head to spot the shaman. The bolt buried itself in his eye with a wet thunk and he fell over, still in his crouch. The bow dropped to the ground and his sword went flying from his hand in a dizzying flash and vanished from those lines that had any meaning in the immediate.

Vectors and intent crossed and darted towards Trowa and he moved, cranking the mechanism back with one strong arm and the stock against his hip and fitting in more quarrels. The first man running towards him lifted his sword. The shaman couldn't see the desperate fear in the man's eyes as the attacker realized he couldn't bridge the distance between them in time. He didn't see the attempt to dodge his aim as the man threw himself to the ground. The loosed bolt intersected the man's movements, slamming him to the ground, the body jerking as the metal point drove itself between two vertebrae. Trowa barely moved; the lines he was following put him in the optimal place for each shot, which gave him plenty of time to dodge the bolts from the leader. The crossbow dipped up to pin the next man running towards him, the bolt shearing the artery in his groin with lethal aim.

The last man was upon him, though in the heat of battle he probably didn't realize he was the last. Trowa dodged left, crouched and rolled beneath the swing of a desperate sword, his fingers grabbing two more runed bolts from his belt and fitting them into the crossbow. Ignoring the man, who was already dead. The man gave a shout, lifting his sword in a huge backswing to cleave the shaman crouching before him - and staggered with a gasp as the leader's last shot accidentally nailed him instead of the dodging, weaving body of his intended target. Trowa twisted as he rose to let the body thunk besides him. His strong arms ratcheted the crossbow's mechanism back as he stood, facing the leader, his last two bolts fitted into the loader.

Trowa couldn't see the man lick his lips, his gaze darting around the fallen bodies. But the lines of intent from his center had curled back and on himself, and the vectors stilled. Trowa swung his crossbow in his direction but left it slightly down, waiting.

"In case you're wondering why you're still sucking air through your windpipe instead of a hole in your chest, we just wanted you to reconsider giving us the name of your buyer," Svale cackled. She was lying, of course. She knew the reason Trowa had not fired at the man was because his shield was of an entirely different sort than his men's, and Trowa's bolts couldn't penetrate it.

"You were right about one thing, hag. I did pay my informant too much. He neglected to tell me the 'cute brunette' was a Nightwalker." He was trying to keep his voice calm. Trowa could feel his lines squirm as he searched for a way out of the predicament. "I think I'll get my money's worth out of him by the end of the day, though. I'll sell what's left of him to the Almanide, he'd make a very pretty eunuch." Trowa watched the lines dart, saw the man weigh the fact that they both had two bolts ready, but that he was shielded and the shaman wasn't. "I guess I can tell you my buyer's name-" lines of intent crossed, the man was hesitating. Hesitating to lie or attack immediately. He didn't know the buyer's name.

Trowa was already dodging before the first bolt left the bow. He swung left, and the bolt whined and bucked the air half an inch from his bare chest. The second bolt was aiming straight at his heart, as the raider loosed it as soon as he saw which way the shaman dodged.

Trowa raised his arm at an almost languid pace. The bolt shattered against his leather wristguard, the arcane runes on it glowing briefly. He didn’t use a full body shield; they could interfere with his Sight, and he’d never needed any larger than his mentor S had made him, many years ago.

The man cursed and grabbed two more bolts. Trowa knelt, steadied his aim, fired twice in quick succession. The first bolt hit the shield at the weakest point, lines of power arcing over the sphere and intersecting just above the man's head. The shield flickered for a fraction of a heartbeat - and in that moment bolt number two darted through and caught the man in the throat.

The raider staggered back, pawing at the bolt for a few seconds, then fell, half-sitting, the crossbow twanging as it fired empty under his convulsing hand. Trowa ignored the dying man's death-rattle as he quickly Walked in his mind the lines around the battlefield. No others waiting in backup, and of those still alive, no more movement vectors; they were dying in stillness and silence.

Trowa sighed as he crouched, putting his crossbow at his feet again, and untied the thongs to his headband. As he lifted it from dazed eyes, light steps echoed behind him and he felt a rough cotton smock press against his back, soft blond hair wisp against his neck, surprisingly strong arms squeeze his shoulders. He reached back and held the other body close as he let the Sight slowly fade.

"Well, let's hope they didn't take too roundabout an approach to circle us. Trowa, stop groping Rabbit and see if you can follow their lines back to their horses. Bring them back to the sanctuary, maybe we can find some information on them. I'll meet you there."

Trowa cast a quick glance at Svale, then took Quatre's hand and left behind them the messy job of finishing off any survivors and checking the bodies for clues. The unspoken offer to let him take Quatre away from that almost made up for the old witch spying on them earlier. Almost.

 

 

A couple of miles away, the raider's informant, who'd been left behind to watch the horses, was busy looting the saddlebags now that the outcome of the fight was decided. Imp turned away from the spinning globe and the slaughter there, and went to help.

"Master, the Nightwalker won."

"Yeah, well, I didn't doubt it." Though Duo had been ready to teleport in and run interference from a discrete distance if necessary. But once the fourth man was down, he realized Trowa did not need his help, and started on the second half of his plan.

"What are we looking for?" Imp upended a duffel bag with surprising strength for something so small and poked at the rather smelly contents. Underwear, especially in that state, was probably not it.

"He should have a couple of energy crystals he stole from that wizard in Gowergate, if he hasn't already sold them -but those he'd have kept on him. Svale will find them. No matter. I don't know what else he picked up. He's been a thorn in my side for awhile now, but he never stole any of the good stuff. Or at least nothing I was after as well."

Imp nodded. If the two-bit raider had ever managed to get hold of anything his master really required, he would have been dead long before. Still, trust Shi No Kami to kill two birds with one stone.

"Hmm, okay, this is-...here, Imp, catch." Duo finished going through the leader's bags, tossing a few objects towards Imp who caught them expertly and tucked them into the small sack he carried.

"Here, Master, don't forget the book."

"As if I would forget the point of the whole exercise," Duo sniffed as he took the book from Imp. The brown silicate cover gleamed under shredded sunbeams, as cloud shadows trailed across the iron green grass of the empty hills. A flat red gem was inset into the cover, gleaming like ruby; the key of the book, ready to be inserted into the stone lock in the innermost cirque. Hopefully Svale knew how to use it. Her words implied she did. That would help reactivate the sanctuary under her control, and then Duo would be able to explore the buried sections properly. Assuming this was indeed the Jishin guardian node, and he was ready to bet what was left of his mind and soul that it was.

He slipped the book into the raider's bags, put the rest back into a semblance of order, tweaked the lines around the horses so that Trowa would miss the traces of his presence, and teleported back to the sanctuary.

 

 

Svale wasn't bouncing up and down with excitement. She caressed the book for the third time, hands lingering over the red stone set in the cover, glaring at the raider's horse as if it could answer her questions.

"I still can't believe this..."

"Wow, do you think that guy was the Shinigami you mentioned, Svale? The one who stole the book to start with?" Duo looked over her shoulder, wishing he could read lines as well as muddle them, curious to know why she wasn't more enthusiastic.

"That sheep-banging bandit? I'd be disappointed if he was. Trowa?"

Trowa shrugged, caressing the mare's forelock.

"Hmm, well, I guess he could have been. Maybe he had some help...Or maybe Shinigami sold the book to some idiot who then got it stolen by that piece of trash. More likely. No reason for him to have kept it for two years. Oh well..."

Her eyes suddenly gleamed. "This opens a whole lot of possibilities! I'm going to need everybody's help! Maxie, go get Heero, he's hiding in his room, Trowa-"

"Later," Trowa said, giving the horse one last pat and walking away. "I have something to finish."

"What?" Duo, Svale and Quatre said at the same time. Trowa grabbed Quatre's hand and, without looking at anybody, tugged him off in the direction of their room.

"Svale, go and play with your new toy," he said without turning around. "Duo can help you. I don't need to make any threats about keeping your nose in your book and out of our room until lunch, do I." It wasn't a question.

"Oh sure, you two go have fun and let me do all the hard work!" Svale grumbled behind their backs, as Duo leered and Quatre, trotting after the shaman, began to blush.

 

 

Next Chapter: Weapon

Beware of Technologists bearing gifts.


	10. Weapon

Chapter 10: Weapon

 

"And let her rip!"

Svale lightly struck the red gem with her staff, then looked up expectantly from the center of the cirque where the key had been inserted into the crack in a craggy boulder.

They all stared at the rock, the gem, the silent standing stones around them, the puffs of cloud overhead...

Nothing happened.

"Nothing happened, Svale," Quatre sighed. Then he perked up. "Oh, I hear something!"

"Wishful thinking," Duo muttered. He was perched on a fallen ley stone nearby and appeared bored. Then he took his chin out of his hand and looked around. “No, wait, I hear it too.”

Heero was looking towards the edge of the stone-ringed hill summit they were on, eyes narrowing.

Trowa, who’d gone to investigate the keen whining on the wind as soon as he’d heard it, unslung his crossbow, eye fixed on a distant speck to the north.

"Planet hopper, incoming," he called over his shoulder.

Svale swore like a drunken sailor and sped out of the cirque until she fell into step with Trowa. The others trailed behind.

The planet hopper wasn't any design they could recognize, in fact it looked like an intimate accident between several different ships, with possibly a boat thrown in for good measure. But the light hum of engines and the impressive array of weaponry indicated it wasn't to be taken as lightly as its appearance led to believe.

"Those are high Techno markings." Quatre muttered, hackles rising instinctively as he noted the hieroglyphs on the side of the ship.

"Are there any kind of shields around this place that can hold that off?" Duo asked warily.

"If he wanted to attack us, we'd be a puddle of hot rock before he even broke orbit," Svale sniffed. She didn't seem too tense.

The ship landed well outside the outer barrier of menhirs, where it had room and where interference from the Sanctuary and its Source wouldn’t put it at risk of mechanical misadventure. Trowa and Svale walked down the mound’s slope and across the Sanctuary’s outer reaches towards their newly arrived visitor.

The hatch hissed and unfolded slowly into a ramp. The man standing there was as odd as his ship. Middle aged, with long tufts of hair on either side of a bald patch, a leery smile and a wide pair of sunglasses which he'd apparently worn while piloting the hopper, in contravention to basic safety rules. A bright red shirt with white and pink splashes and shorts over knobbly knees completed the outfit. 

A figure of doom and destruction he wasn't. Everybody relaxed a little, except for Svale.

"Howard!" she snapped.

"Svale! You old relic! Why, you still don't look a day over five hundred. How ever do you do it?"

"You techno pagan! Tell me why I shouldn't reduce you and that metallic monstrosity to dust and rust for defiling my Sanctuary?"

"I've brought booze?"

"Hmf, good enough. Come on in, but mind your manners."

Howard sauntered down the ramp, his liquid peace offering in one hand and a pink plastic shopping bag reinforced with twine in the other. Then he stopped.

"Hot mama, Svale! Are you collecting boy toys? Whooa- oh, hi Trowa."

"Howard." Trowa nodded with a slight smile. He glanced over his shoulder at Heero, Duo and Quatre, hanging back a bit and framed by two menhirs. He had to admit they made one hell of a pretty picture. The latter two had taken the 'boy toy' crack in a prickly manner. Heero was oblivious, he was looking at the planet hopper as if it were some kind of giant locust. Apparently the man didn't like technology, and maybe not technologists either. Trowa filed that away and decided to keep a careful eye on Heero. Howard didn't look like much, but he was, in fact, the leader of the Techno-Cabal on Center and in the galaxy, and one of the most powerful men on the planet. Not someone Heero should take a swing at. Fortunately Trowa knew from past experience that Howard's tastes ran to machinery first, then pretty blond ladies next (though Trowa suspected boys would do in a pinch) so at least he wouldn't be pulling a Svale on the somber Heero.

"So, what brings you to this neck of the woods?" They’d sat themselves around the rough dining table in Svale’s rooms in the compound, and their hostess was handing out disparate glasses to all bar Heero. It’d been quickly established that Heero didn't find any pleasure in eating or drinking, considering them mere bodily functions to be tended to when needed and otherwise ignored. Which meant he didn’t complain about Svale’s cooking, and they would hopefully never find out what a drunk Heero was like...

"Oh, I have a few things to run by you... Who's the company?" Howard's eyes were flicking around, but he seemed to come back to Heero again and again.

"This is Heero, and this is Maxie."

" _Duo Maxwell_ you old-"

"You already know Trowa, and the boy he's hanging on to is-"

"Quatre," Trowa said firmly. He was leaning against a wall, his arms loosely clasped over Quatre's chest as the blond leaned against him, just in case Howard decided the healer was pretty enough to flirt with.

Some time was then spent talking. Svale and Howard had many common acquaintances, though they didn’t run into each other too often; they moved in very different circles, the techno and the arcane. Apparently some of these common acquaintances were responsible for the visit.

"Rumors are flying in the higher spheres, Svale. I hear things have gotten lively in your pile of ruins recently. Seems your boy here-" nod to Trowa "-nailed Shinigami."

Svale snorted, sending a wave of liquory breath wafting across the table. "Don't make me laugh. That pissant? Trowa didn't even break a sweat. Shinigami is a highly skilled mage, whoever he -or she- is. That wasn't him."

"Oh really? But I heard you found some interesting loot in his baggage. Master Magius Arterio Willins would like his Jishin book back, by the way."

"Finders keepers, he should have shot the bugger himself!" Svale tossed back her glass, slammed it down on the table and glared. "Or he can come here and fight me for it!"

"Feh, I don't care one way or another what you crazy magic users get up to. I've got bigger fish to fry. The biggest."

"Whozzat then?"

Howard's relaxed smile finally tightened as he dropped the bomb. "Jusan."

Svale's glass exploded in her fist.

"What?" she whispered.

"I thought the order of guardians had wind of something big comin' this way?" Howard queried, peering into his glass then grabbing the bottle. He looked glum.

"Yeah. Yeah, we did. The signs and portents have been nuts. Center’s screaming at us. I've been, um, taking steps, following lines, reeling stuff in." She glanced at Heero as she brushed shards from her hand into the fireplace. "But Jusan...by   
the hairy balls of Basht, what does the Scourge want?"

"Maybe he’s come here for a holiday? Destroying the five most powerful races in the galaxy must have tuckered him out a tad. If not a trip to the beach, then I’m pretty sure he’s come to wipe out all the more dangerous magic users and arcana on the planet. That’s his usual MO."

"Does he plan on leaving the rest of Center intact?"

"Are you shitting me?"

"Oh hell."

"That's what I said, and I don't even believe in life after death."

"Is that why you came?" Svale looked at him curiously.

"I came for several things. First, when I heard about Shinigami-"

"He wasn't Shinigami."

"Well, I didn't know that. Shinigami stole some artifacts from us awhile back."

"What? He's after techno stuff too? The guy's a magpie!"

"He didn't take much, and his selection was...interesting. I was hoping you'd found some of it."

"We'll let you take a look at what we found, Howie, but don't get your hopes up."

"Ah, no matter. The next thing is, I heard you are reactivating this sanctuary. And I’m assuming it’s not for the love of archeology."

"Trying to, is the keyword you're missing here. Until I can get it going...there’s not much to say."

"Oh. Okay. And final rumor: I heard you found someone interesting at the end of a powerful line."

"And if I did?" Svale looked at him carefully.

Howard put fingers on either side of his glass and twisted it into the rough wood of the table. He seemed hesitant, almost reluctant.

"If you have, I think I might have a present for him."

Svale blinked. "Uh?"

Howard picked up the pink plastic bag and set it on the table with a metallic clunk. He undid the twine, peeled away the plastic.  
Inside were several pieces of metal. The biggest was a curved L a couple of handspans long. Then there were two metal wrist guards, what appeared to be a metal anklet, another chunk whose purpose was unclear, and the hilt of a bladeless sword. The metal was gray with blue tinges, blue and gold paint decorated the biggest piece. It had to be pretty light, since the plastic bag showed only slight signs of warping under the weight of all that metal.

"Very nice. What is it, modern art?" Svale grunted and nudged a piece.

"It's something very special. Unique, now. And very dangerous." Svale removed her finger. "It's gundanium, in case you were wondering."

"Gundanium?" Quatre asked as Svale hissed. Duo was frowning, puzzled. Heero looked bored.

"That’s the techno name for Dragon Scale," Trowa explained. 

"Whoa!" Duo leaned forward. "You mean this is Dragon armor? No way! Or else it's in bits!"

Howard flashed his dark glasses his way. "It’s a Dragon mecha-armor, to be more exact. It's all there and functional, though not fully, more's the pity. I think it will come in handy. Whoever takes on the job of leading the fight against Jusan will need all the help they can get. I'll give this to whoever volunteers for that mission. As long as he or she can handle the goods. Does your boy wants to try?"

"Hmm." Svale's eyes drifted to Trowa's and they stared at each other for a minute, before Svale shrugged.

"He's a free man. Heero, you interested?"

Heero looked up.

"Well, boy?"

Heero just stared.

Svale sighed. "He's a bit strange, but he means well. I hope. I'm not sure about this, Howard. This could be...dangerous. And, ah, I don't actually know Heero all that well-"

"I don't want that." Heero was looking at the armor as if it had insulted him.

Everyone stared. Howard gasped and Duo dropped his cup.

"Hey there, buddy, c'mon, that was a bit abrupt!" Duo grinned at him, eyes a trifle wide. "This nice guy is bringing you a present and you turn him down? Granted, it doesn't look like much-"

"It is machinery. It means nothing to me." Heero glared first at the metal then at Duo, who hesitated, lost.

"But-...but it's a weapon, man!"

Heero had been turning back to glare at the armor, but at those words he speared Duo with a stare.

"That is no weapon. It is a machine."

"Lad,” Howard said gently, caressing his chin "this is probably the strongest weapon you will ever find."

Heero turned slowly to look at him, then dropped his eyes to the metal, shining dimly in its improbable pink plastic wrapping. "Weapon," he said, as if tasting the word.

"And it fortunately doesn't require brain power to use," Howard muttered, but then saw Svale shaking her head quickly. Heero did not pick up the insult though. The others had not been able to determine how intelligent he was, but they were beginning to suspect he was a good deal smarter than he let on. A good deal. But he also didn't care enough about most things to let it show. Insults flew right over his head.

Heero extended a hand towards the metal but didn't touch it. He scowled as if frustrated.

"Well, lad, if you’re interested, I might just let you borrow it. I have a test first though, and it'll be a lot harder than you think. I can't just let anybody use-..."

Howard's voice trailed off. Heero's eyes had concentrated on the metal as if he could dig holes in it. His hand was as firm as a rock an inch above the piece. Everybody stared. They'd never seen him like that. The silence dragged, no one dared say anything.

"Weapon," Heero murmured.

Then his eyes widened. There was a sudden softness in the granite face as the ghost of a look of wonder haunted Heero's features.

"He has a name. I can feel it," Heero whispered.

The silence could be cut with a knife as everyone else turned towards Howard. He no longer looked like a cooky old man. His eyes were narrowed and highly intelligent behind the dark glasses as they fixed Heero. He didn't bother explaining the rest of the test, since it was obvious now that Heero would take it whatever he said. 

“Yes. Yes it does,” Howard said slowly. “Its name is Wing."

\---

Next Chapter: Wing

Heero likes.


	11. Wing

Once Heero slid on the wrist bands and clipped on the anklet, the curved L-shaped piece of metal almost leapt out of Duo's hands to cling to the hard chest. The long arm of the L shape settled just along the top of his abdomen, the short part curved up towards Heero’s shoulder, their intersection rested over his heart. It looked almost like a partial piece of chest-armor, Duo thought, though it couldn't possibly protect any vital organ from damage, it was too small.

The sword hilt similarly clung to Heero's side as if magnetized to his body. The last piece fit in the dark curls above his right ear, also clinging mysteriously. Duo stared at it, astonished, and tried to tug it off. It wouldn't give.

"Er, Howard,” he called over his shoulder, “how's he supposed to wash his hair?"

"Hmm?"

Everybody - apart from Heero who was examining the wrist guards, oblivious - swiveled to stare at Howard who had wandered out from the cockpit.

"Who the hell is driving this thing!?" Svale squawked.

"A nice guy called Mr Auto Pilot," Howard sneered, jerking his head back towards the instrument panel of the planet-hopper. "As for your question, Maxie-"

"Duo."

"Yeah, whatever, to answer your question, who cares about his hair? Though in this instance the weapon will deactivate and detach itself after awhile. I've only input a partial activation code. I'll be here to input the code again if he can convince me he can use Wing. If he defeats Jusan, I'll give him the means to activate it himself. You understand that, Heero?"

Heero looked up slowly to face the dark sunglasses. Howard didn't flinch from those dark blue eyes.

"You don't own Wing until you save Center from the Scourge. And survive. Until then, Wing will deactivate regularly, and I am the only one who knows how to get it working again at that point. No offense, lad, but this is a means to an end for me, it's not a free lunch."

Heero frowned. Then he said slowly: "Jusan." It wasn't a question, it sounded like he was searching his memory for a meaning to attach to the word.

"Yes, Jusan, the Scourge. You've heard of him, right?"

"No."

"You haven't?! Did you grow up under a rock or something? Man, if you don't know who he is, we're going to have a problem, you -"

"I will kill him."

"Uh?" Howard's hair seemed to twitch upward in surprise.

"I want Wing. I will kill him to have it."

"You...really don't know who he is, do you." Howard wasn't asking a question. He looked at Trowa, who shrugged slightly. Both Trowa and Svale had asked Howard if he was sure he wanted to lend Wing to Heero; they couldn't understand why he was handing such an apparently powerful artifact to someone he'd just met. The old technologist refused to explain his reasons, but he seemed quite adamant that Heero should wear Wing. And now Heero seemed adamant that he should keep it, even if it meant opposing Jusan with nothing but a few strips of metal to protect him.

Duo looked uncertainly at the armor. With some effort. Heero had stripped to put it on and Duo's eyes kept wandering. Duo’s focus was frighteningly single-minded, a weapon forged in death and destruction and years of hate. Didn’t mean he was blind or dead below the belt-line, though. Heero was a means to an end, a blade Duo was forging, a terrifying fighter- and one hell of a looker, especially in that get-up. Trowa had been sitting on Svale for the last ten minutes of the trip.

"It doesn't look like much," Duo muttered, bringing his attention back, with a little bit of difficulty, to the crux of the matter. The protection offered by the ‘armor’ was pitiful.

"It's a thing of great beauty." Howard's voice was dead serious. "And a thing of great terror in the wrong hands. And the death sentence of an entire race. If you think of it like that, it doesn't seem so puny."

"What? What death sentence?" Quatre glanced up in surprise.

"Wing was the Dragons' finest creation, and they made many things of greatness."

"That's a technologist's opinion if there ever was one," Svale snorted.

Howard ignored the interruption, his eyes distant behind the ever-present sunglasses. "Wing and the other mechas of its generation were what caught Jusan's attention. It was a long series of battles, but he crushed the Dragons for having built them."

Quatre stared in horror at the thin strips of metal which, in his eyes, would not justify taking one life, let alone an entire race.

"Yeah, he kicked the crap outta the dragons," Duo said. "I'd feel sorry for them if they weren't a bunch of hyperactive, conquest-bent mechanized savages."

"I second that sentiment," Svale growled. "Not that I want to see Jusan eliminate anybody, but I can't feel all that sorry for the Dragons. Most of their clans served him for a century before they got a bit too smart for their own good. Some would call it karma."

"Some would call it a tragedy," Howard answered, eyes sombre as he looked at Wing. "One of the youngest races, and I grant you they had a lot to learn about diplomacy, but so inventive, strong and beautiful. They'd given me hope for the future of the human races. And Jusan murdered them before they even had a chance to fulfill their potential."

"They don't call him the Scourge because of his sparkling personality," Svale grumped. Then she looked thoughtful. "I never understood why he took out the Dragons, though. Jusan seems to want to exterminate magic users, not technos."

"We were kinda puzzled too," Howard grunted. "And worried. Very puzzled. But mainly worried." Howard was the head of the Techno-Cabal on Center, one of its powers in the galaxy, and didn't like to feel a bullseye on his back.

"No kidding. So, are we there yet? Wherever 'there' is?" Svale whined.

"Just about." Howard had offered to take them to a place where Heero could safely test out Wing, but had not said where they were going.

Duo leaned towards Heero. "You sure you want to do this, buddy? It sounds bloody dangerous, the way Howard talks 'bout it."

He realized his hand was on Heero's naked shoulder, and that the sombre man was looking at it. But Heero glanced away before Duo could snatch his hand back. He didn't seem to mind. Duo left his hand on Heero's shoulder, a gesture of encouragement rather than another useless pass. Heero did seem to be warming to him a little, which was good.

Something in the cockpit beeped and Howard ducked back. A few minutes later, the ship dropped steeply and landed with a bump, and the ramp opened to-

"By Tintula's tits, you took us to the Mater!?" Svale screeched, surging through Trowa's legs to stare outside. "Are you nuts?! Why here?"

The Mater was the epitome of Center’s harsh, wild soul, a place of powerful, primeval magic. The sky was dark and roiling from the permanent thunderhead covering the region, vicious whirlpools of clouds twisting in gunmetal gray coils. It echoed the tortured earth beneath, heaving in frozen waves of broken rock, ravines, cliffs, cracked columns of once molten granite, and the ancient maws of extinct volcanoes. A few dark gray-green shrubs clung to the writhing landscape for dear life, battling the ever-blowing wind. A crackle of thunder echoed over their heads. The place reeked of wild power, sudden death and barely leashed destruction.

Howard raised his voice a bit to be heard over the keening wind. "He's gotta be able to use Wing when it matters, Svale, and the whole of Center will be like the Mater when Jusan gets here. If you'll allow me to wax lyrical for a moment, I'll remind you that the Scourge is a sinkhole of raw force, a cataclysmic power of evil, and the entire planet will ring like a bell under his feet. Okay, I'm done now. Right, Heero, follow me." Howard trotted down the ramp. Heero stepped after him. He was wearing only Wing and a tight pair of black shorts that Howard had dug up on his ship, but he didn't seem to feel the bite of the cold, desiccating wind. Duo shivered for him.

"Now lad, let's get down to it. I'm going to teach you how to use Wing. It's not going to be easy, it'll take awhile." The Techno Cabalist turned away to face the others who'd followed down the ramp. "You guys can go and wait in the ship if you like, this part will be long and boring."

"Why couldn't we do this back at the sanctuary?" Svale whined.

"Because I didn't want any Jishin interference with Wing while the boy gets used to it," Howard snapped back. "The Jishin had a lot of wards against high techno artifacts like Wing and this is going to be hard enough as it is, it's not an easy weapon to control, or even activate." Behind him, Heero was frowning intently at the wrist guards. Something stirred, the band covering his chest seemed to settle a bit as if he'd shrugged his shoulders.

Howard looked suddenly morose. "To tell you the truth, I don't know how well he'll do. I can barely understand Wing myself."

"Er-" Duo said, looking behind Howard.

"It's technology that seems to cut at a tangent to physics and most of techno knowledge. Unlike regular Gundanium armor - which is already pretty kickass, mind you - the mechas are semi-intelligent and interface with the owner-"

"Howard?"

"- at a psychic and some believe even spiritual level. He may not be able to activate it at all, as far as I know. Using a gundanium mecha is a rite of passage to the Dragons -was a rite. A Dragon's Scale was as important to him and his social class as- as-...well, as a Jishin's spirit armor, to take a wildly inappropriate analogy you and your sanctuary might at least be familiar with, Svale. Using it is a trial of strength and power, especially for a highly advanced-"

"H-Howard?!" Duo yelped. Quatre gasped.

"-piece like Wing - _what is it?_ " Howard glared at Duo who was staring at the sight behind the older man's back.

"Is it supposed to be doing that?"

Howard turned slowly.

Heero had stepped away a bit and lifted his arms straight out at his sides, head tilted back slightly and eyes closed in concentration. 

The bits of gundanium fastened to his skin were twinkling and almost writhing, and small trickles of what looked like molten metal were running down his chest, over his back, up his neck and twisting delicately over his arms in an almost sensuous slither, joining the portions of armor together.

"Fuck me," Howard muttered.

The movement accelerated, and the metal coagulated into plates of armor over Heero's chest, back, groin, upper legs and shoulders. The wrist guards had extended to cover his forearms. His upper arms were bare, as were his legs up to mid-thigh. The metal solidified and the armor looked almost normal, but there was a feeling of tension there, of potential.

Heero took the sword hilt from a metal grip that had grown around it, cocked it, and with a noise like wind tearing paper a ragged beam of light flared from it, a small eruption of flames. Heero nodded, unsmiling but with satisfaction and savage joy in every line of his body. Duo felt a shiver go through him, fear mingled with a healthy dose of curiosity in the potential of this power echoing deep into the dark caverns of his mind. He chose to listen to the former rather than the latter. He wasn't suicidal, and Heero was definitely more interested in Wing than he was in being Duo’s lab rat. At least knowingly. 

"Wing. We are going to get along very well," Heero said with a voice of finality.

Howard finally closed his jaw with a click. "Yeah, lad, looks like you are. Right...well, if you want to try it out, feel free to play around. There's plenty of stuff here to blow up and we're the only living things around for miles." Howard made a vague gesture out towards the heart of the Mater. "Now the sword is pretty obvious, but as for the shield, and the energy- hey?!"

Heero was striding away, his boots clicking rapidly on the rock.

"Hey lad!" Howard called after him, waving his arms in agitation.

"Give it up, Howie." Duo sighed. "He's got that look in his eyes, he's not going to stop for anything now. He'll figure it out."

"Heero, avoid any markers! There's a lot of Sources out here!" Svale shouted at his back.

They were all silent, watching Heero's armored figure get smaller and smaller.

Svale scratched her wrinkled chin. "Man, I hope he doesn't stumble into a Source... though maybe the Judgment of God would be a good way of telling us we're doing the right thing."

"Why should some psycho-aggregate stuck in a transdimensional conduit be a judge of what I am going to do with the most powerful weapon around?" Howard growled, still staring after Heero.

"Howard, we're in a region of many powerful sources, please watch your words. They're Gods, not-"

"They're aggregates! Pseudo-human wish-fulfillments!"

That was a long-time technologist grind. There were Sources on every planet in the galaxy, but the strongest and the greatest number were on Center. They were little areas that escaped all natural laws. It was dangerous to enter a Source unprepared, so humans marked them out with stone markers and warnings, and appeased the demons and gods within them with offerings and prayers.

Which was all bull, according to the technologist Cabal. They knew that Sources were not mystical or holy places; they were breaches into a dimension of absolute power. The Sources themselves were only a tiny crack into that other plane of existence. Since the laws of cause and effect and of reality itself were putty in those places, the more powerful ones picked up and imprinted into the zeitgeist of whatever human population was closest, and legends and myths took shape there, accretions from the overall psyche creating pseudo-humans to fulfill fantasies and myths; Gods, born from the subconscious needs of humanity to have narrative, to build stories. But they were only a conduit for the real power as far as the Technos were concerned. Which didn't mean they couldn't get very, very cross with atheists.

"Er, Gods, Howie, you know, not to be pissed off?" Duo muttered, glancing around nervously.

"They're only immortal and all-powerful within the confines of their Sources. They lose coherency rapidly if they venture out of them and disappear in a puff of hot air shortly after that. Your boy Heero is ten times as powerful as a sourceless God, and you know it. Why should I send him into a Source to be judged by one in those conditions? Their accidental existence does not give them any kind of superior moral judgment."

"Oh boy, I can just taste the lightning bolts already." Svale's yellowy eyes glowered, looking around carefully.

"Shit, they don't care, as long as I don't bother their power supply or interfere too much with the credulity of ignoramuses that gives them a mental toe-hold into the human psyche. It's not even that they do all that much with it anyway; some have taught us a few pitiful magic tricks. Big whoop. Most of their arcana can easily be rivaled by techno machines. And in exchange for the ability to pull rabbits out of a hat, these Gods decide they're allowed to tell us how to live our lives, and fill our heads with stupid myths and legends and-"

"-and a sense of what being human actually means. They tell us our story, the greatest story of all. They are the tapestry of our imagination made real and they challenge us to look at ourselves and our accomplishments from a different perspective. All your machines can't give you that, Howard," Svale said quietly, and Trowa nodded slightly.

"Balls."

"Their influence is subtle, I grant you, but without it the human races would lose their way, become empty and soulless, barely better than computers. Leave the Gods alone, Howard."

"Hmph."

"Don't growl at me, you old dog, I know you know I'm right." Svale thumped Howard on the head with her ever-present staff. "If you really believed all that heretic gumph you spout, you'd let Jusan come here and wipe out all of Center’s magic users and shaman and dreamers, leaving the Sources bereft of input. I’m sure he’s wanted to for centuries, he seems to hate magic. He's a techno wet dream come true!"

Howard bristled. "He's an aberration himself, he uses magic to _exist_ , where does he get off saying what Tao men should walk?"

"That, we can agree on."

In the distance a sudden blossom of fire was followed by a rumble.

"Shit!" Duo muttered and sprinted towards the smoking remains. He heard Trowa right behind him, and Howard shouting at them to not get too close.

They climbed a sharp scree slope, a few black rocks sliding down it, their sharp clatter the only noise now.

Heero was standing past the top of the scree with the sword in hand, staring at some rubble which, Duo realized as he watched a slab of rock crumble from a smoking edge, had once been a thick stone pillar. Heero's pose reminded him of...yes, the way he'd been acting back when the bandits leader, Fardyo, had attacked him; concentrated on Trowa's sword, shaking it and swishing it as if it were broken.

Well Wing was apparently working for him just fine. The flames crackled and burned through the air with every swish, and Heero’s eyes gleamed with satisfaction.

He flicked it once more sharply, and the flame flared and then died. Heero dropped the sword casually at waist-height, and it leapt and fastened itself back to the sheath Wing had created for it. Then Heero cracked his knuckles. The wrist-guards responded by sending tendrils of metal shooting up his hands to build into strong mailed fingerless gloves. Heero flicked his hands out a few times before him, inspecting the result, then made a fist and, faster than either spectator could really comprehend, knelt and brought it crashing into the ground.  
The rock beneath their feet rang like a bell and the whole Mater seemed to shudder around them. The granite beneath Heero's impact buckled and cracked. He slowly stood, examining the mailed glove covering his hand.

"Satisfactory."

He flicked the hand again, and the glove slunk back into the wrist-guard like a banished puppy. He held the arm out still, and something seemed to hover over the wrist-guard, a presence warping the air like a permanent heat-wave in the coolness of thunder-born winds. As Heero moved his arm, something keened in contact with the air. Heero nodded, satisfied, then turned and walked back towards the ship, leaving Duo and Trowa to catch up with him, eyes wide in amazement.

Howard and Svale were arguing about some obscure mythological point, and Quatre was trying to stop them from hitting each other, when Heero drew near.

"Ah, so, what do you think, lad?" Howard turned from Svale with a frown and rubbed his pate.

"It's not fully functional," Heero stated, glowering at Howard who took a step back instinctively.

"Man, you can tell? I must say I'm impressed, kid. Yeah, there's a few things missing or broken. It was on a planet that Jusan destroyed, it was stolen by a mercenary band, and passed from hand to hand a few times, you're lucky it even works at all."

Heero was glowering at Wing. So it was Duo who asked: "Can you fix it, Howie?"

"It seems to work pretty well to me already," Trowa murmured, with a glance back over his shoulder. Duo could also remember the feeling of the ground bucking under Heero's fist.

"Yeah, but it's got to be one hundred percent for Jusan," Svale pointed out, looking worried.

"Well..." Howard scratched his head. "To tell you the truth, this is the first time I've found anybody who can activate it anywhere near full capacity, so I don't know what's missing. I'll examine it now and see. Some stuff I can cobble together. But some things... and the stuff we'll need, hmm, not going to be easy to get, it's not the kind of stuff you buy at the local pawnshop."

Keen eyes behind the dark glasses flitted over Duo, Trowa and Quatre, as well as Heero. "There are some things I'll need help getting. The _hard_ kinda help, if you see what I mean. The kind of help that ends up with someone's bones getting broken. But if we all work together...well, arcane and techno hand in hand, what can go wrong?"

Then he corrected himself. "Plenty actually. But at least we'll rock!"

 

Howard had declared he'd stay with them - bar some side trips to pick up pieces that could be used to tune Wing - until Jusan's arrival. He turned down the offer of a room in the Jishin Sanctuary on account of it being primitive, drafty, and 'giving him the screaming wiggins'. He was holed up alone in his ship. He was used to the cramped quarters, his home away from home, and he had plenty of tools handy there. The high-techno locking mechanism on the door also brought him a certain peace of mind. He scratched his head as he adjusted a precision lens over his eye and bent over Wing's headpiece on the table.

A slight breeze made goose bumps run up his spine.

"What's up, Maxie?" he snickered without turning around.

"Don't you start..."

"Ah, suits you."

"Screw you."

"No thanks, don't swing that way." Howard put down the piece of mecha and swiveled in his chair to look at the dark figure perched on his fold-out bed in the ship's cabin.

"So...Heero. What do you make of him?" Duo asked quietly, eyes distant.

Howard hesitated, lifting the magnifying glasses off his face. "Honestly, he gives me the creeps."

"Spoken like a true technologist. I find him a compelling mystery, myself." Duo smiled, a feral movement of the lips. His eyes were serious though. "But I know why he gives you the creeps, as you say. He does something that most techno pagans like yourself would qualify as blasphemy."

"Uh?" Howard slipped his dark glasses back onto his nose as if they could help him figure out what Duo meant. He was fairly used to the young man's tendency to being cryptic by now.

Duo looked at him curiously. "You didn't notice? I did. But I've been hanging around him for awhile. He never asks a question."

"What do you mean?"

"He never asks a question. Ever. Not even in a roundabout way. It's as if he..." His eyes narrowed and gleamed in darkness. "It's as if he never learned to reach out and share with others, their knowledge or anything, as if he's always been alone."

"Now I'm really creeped out." Howard puffed his cheeks. "Mind you, maybe I'm the one not asking enough questions here."

"What do you mean?"

"Five years ago a young whippersnapper still wet behind the ears comes up to me and tells me from the pinnacle of his sixteen years that he's the notorious Shinigami that had burst on stage a few months before." A face, still young, watched him with eyes older and crueler than time, eyes that had made Howard quite certain the youth was telling the truth even back then. 

"He provides me with some interesting artifacts to study, asking me some very strange questions in return. Then last year he brings me -for free!- the biggest prize a Cabalist of my level can ask for: Wing, the best of all Gundanium mechas. Just like that. 'Study it, Howie, tell me what you can about it' - not that you ever showed that much interest in my results. 'Just be ready to give it to the person I tell you to'. And now I find myself, on your say-so, handing over the greatest weapon known to man to some weird-ass pretty boy who can't even ask a question. I should get my head examined. And I should question you."

"You're a smart man, Howard. You already know most of the answers."

"Yes. Yes I guess I do. Hope you're right about Heero, lad."

"Oh, so do I, Howard. So do I."

 

Next Chapter: Parallel Lines

It’s obvious this fic needs more sex.


	12. Parallel Lines

Quatre drifted back to the shallow end of sleep at the slight noise from the door. Trowa, he registered. His talk with Svale and Howard, to plan the next series of moves in preparation for Jusan's arrival, must have finally ended...

He let a numb hand flop toward the dip in the bed, muttering something that didn't make much sense even to him.

A feather-light touch on his palm. A shiver of feelings, muddled and toned down, but still warm, and a clean herbal smell he knew pretty damn well by now.

Quatre's eyes shot open, suddenly alert.

Green eye and silver behind a cascade of hair near him. A gentle finger brushing his jaw as the shaman registered he was awake. The light of the moon penned the picture in tones of silver-blue and slate. Quatre's lips shaped the word 'What?'

"Make love to me." The finger dipped into his hair, slid over the pulse that had leaped in his throat -wide awake now!- over his shoulder, then the hand curved up his neck, pulling him towards parted lips.

Quatre let the kiss linger, then leaned back.

"What?" he asked more firmly. It wasn't a request for Trowa to repeat his words, which, as it happened, were ringing in Quatre's ears and making waves all the way to his groin.

The shaman eyes flickered, though he didn't try to feign ignorance. He leaned forward to capture his lover's lips again, but Quatre put a firm hand between them. Trowa was caressing him, easing him out of his breeches, but he ignored both the touch and his body's reaction.

The shaman stilled, slight pain in his eye.

"...I want you to-...I think it would be better for both of us if you return to Calleese tomorrow. For awhile."

"Oh it's that good, is it?" Quatre wasn't even surprised. "Just how dangerous is this plan Svale and Howard have cooked up?"

"We need to go to this black market in- it won't be too dangerous for Heero and myself, but I don't want you - or Duo - involved. The whole thing with Jusan is-"

"Duo can do has he damn well pleases. _I_ will be cheering you on from the sidelines." Quatre said firmly.

"Love-"

"No."

"But-"

"No." Quatre's hand rose to caress the angle of the handsome jaw with the back of his wrist.

The silver eye seemed to have already accepted the direction their lines were taking - always parallel if Quatre had anything to say about it - but the green speck in the shadow of the moon flickered with anxiety.

"You do not walk the lines of the Earth, Quatre-"

"Yes I do. Or at least I'm trotting along a little off to one side, following your long strides."

"This is not your fight."

"No, it's yours. I accept that. I accept that you have to dedicate yourself to Center. She's been a kind mistress up until now, she let us have a lot of time together, but I've always known you might be called to her duty one day. I won't take any risks, I won't fight, but I'll be there. Don't kill me, Trowa."

"What?!"

"Don't send me back to the partial life I led before I met you. I couldn't stand to feel a part of me die inside."

"Quatre..."

"Is that a yes?"

"I-... I'll think about it."

"Do I still get to make love to you?" Quatre's artfully hopeful grin was a bit shaky but his eyes shone.

"Please do." The beautiful lips curved into a tentative smile. But the eye was still so hesitant, unsure, doubtful of what would be best...

Quatre shifted to allow the hands to undress him fully in a rustle of cloth and a caress. The shaman was already naked, the way he usually slept. The healer found the little pot thrust gently into his hand and he carefully put it on the floor after fishing out a dollop of the smooth cold cream.

"Do you remember the day we met?" he whispered, turning back towards Trowa and letting a hand run from shoulder to hip and back again. He was blushing again, but he didn't care. He was focused on a humid day, crude heavy sunlight drizzling through the windows of a clinic that had been his home. The light had beaten against the white sheets screening the bed he was changing when the door had opened behind him. 

"I heard steps behind me and I finished the bed just as you said-"

" 'Hello? I heard you sell salves. Got anything for mosquito bites?' " Trowa's voice trembled in a smile. "And you pushed back the curtain and said 'Oh-'"

" 'Oh my, have you just come through the swamp? In summer?' " Quatre's hand slid to the hip again and gently lifted the long leg over his own, hand brushing up again, over lean muscles and defined buttocks. "The sunlight was streaming through the open window behind you, I had my hand up to cut the glare. I moved to the right so I could see you better. You looked...My mind just went completely blank. I saw your lips move-"

" 'S-swamp... ?' " Trowa's voice curled into a rueful chuckle as he imitated the slightly concussed tones of a man who'd momentarily forgotten what a swamp was, despite spending two days struggling through one, and who was covered in insect bites to prove it. He arched his back slightly as a gentle hand kneaded his muscles from hip to lower back. "You looked at me as if I was insane. Then-"

"Actually I was worried you'd caught water fever," Quatre muttered. His hand tingled at the feel of firm muscles shifting beneath it; his other hand, fingers curled over the cream in his palm, ghosted over skin and led the way for his mouth to meet a firm chest, a raised nipple. "That brought my mind back from wherever it was wandering- " a slight nip, a smile brushing against skin at the near-silent hiss from his lover "-and I can't tell you where that was to this day...How long did we just stare at each other?" His fingers left the hip to curl into the cream, the scent of herbs catching his nose enticingly.

Trowa shivered as a gentle finger, wet and cool, circled him and teased. Quatre moved forward, bringing their bodies together, a warm waist pressing against the shaman's erection.

"I-...don't know." Trowa's mind was back there, standing still, charmed, in the hot afternoon air of the clinic, while his body thrummed under the touch and the moonlight of the present. "Now that I think of it you did mutter something about 'fever' but then you said-"

" 'Come back here and take your clothes off.'" Quatre groaned, sinking his head into Trowa's shoulder. "I swear it was the healer talking. Mostly. The look you gave me-...I rationalized it as surprise-"

"Well it was mai- mainly." Trowa's voice and heart skipped a beat as the cool finger dipped into his warmth. "I felt like falling over backwards - or at your feet - but the look in your eyes was pretty straightforward. You weren't even blushing." Quatre's face was now radiating the heat of a sultry summer day into his shoulder. Trowa relaxed into the movement within him, and let his hands linger over fair skin, silver in the moonlight. Quatre shifted back slightly to let his own free hand dip down between their bodies, caressing a flat stomach and the stiffening flesh between them. He moved up a bit to bring his own heat in contact with his lover's, thrilling at the trembling of both members together, as he used the rest of the cream, now warmed, to best effect, caressing both erections in smooth pulsing movements.

Trowa groaned, sweat prickling his skin, his voice husky. "Next thing I know, I'm sitting on a high bed with my- my shirt off and praying to all the animal guides I've ever known you won't ask me to take off my pants."

"Trust me, that wasn't going to happen." Quatre's face was flushed but beaming, eyes sparkling in moonlight. "I could feel my heart squirming against my chest already. I couldn't believe it, I had never reacted that strongly and unclinically to anybody before, but the way you were looking at me-"

"-like I had been granted vision for the first time...Ah!" Trowa gasped as a second finger twined and twitched into jolts of light that danced across his body like sun shafting through a clinic's windows to play with golden hair. His body thrummed, making him arch onto his back. The healer followed his movement, smiling at the more interesting position, and knelt between the long legs, fingers still kneading and stretching.

"The silence was getting awkward." Quatre's voice was dreamy despite his rapid breathing as he leaned forward, still rubbing slightly against his lover's erection like a small golden cat. "I desperately tried to think of something to say while I examined you. But God, you took my breath away. I had to be blushing..."

"N-no, you just looked really serious. I couldn't do anything but watch you." Trowa's voice dropped to a whisper humming with his heartbeat. "I was seeing all my lines mapped out before me and they all led to you. I could feel my center shift in the sunlight and I thanked whatever Gods I'd ever served for that moment, I-"

"-felt like you were coming alive?" Quatre's voice was also an aching hush. His eyes were wide with pain. "Isn't that it? That's how I feel-" Then his face softened. "You must have realized the silence was killing me because you said-"

" 'Have you been the priest here long?' And yes, I had realized you were getting a bit choked up because I would never have said something so-...trivial otherwise." Trowa rolled his eyes, then let them close slowly as his body pulsed to the gentle rhythm within and without, slow still but with a promise of wild pleasure to come. After a minute he added, panting. "And you had the grace to- ignore how- stupid- "

"I didn't think it was stupid, I was bloody grateful." Quatre grinned, enjoying the waves of pleasure he was sending crashing through his lover. "I said 'A year now'. And then I asked you if you were staying long." Quatre suddenly stilled, eyes shining like tears in the moonlight, face serious. "I didn't know what I wanted, didn't even realize there was anything to want, but something in me tightened like a noose as I watched you hesitate. And then you said-"

" 'I think I'll be staying for awhile, actually. I have some skills in mixing herbs, and I don't mind walking the swamp at night to collect them. Maybe I could help you.'" Trowa's voice was a whisper. "I thought I was insane, you were very visibly not contemplating anything with the question, but I would have settled for your friendship or even simply your presence a few more days at that point...And then you said..."

"...'I have a small room above the stables if you want.' And I don't know what possessed me to say that. ‘If you're staying for more than a few days...' "

" 'As long as you'll let me...' "

" 'Then it's yours.'..."

The lovers were still beneath the moonlight for a few seconds, then Quatre smiled and leaned forward, and curled the smile around his lover's erection as his fingers started to move in time with the movements of his lips and tongue. Trowa groaned and trembled, then his hands caught in fair hair gone white in the moon's transparent light and he drew his lover towards him. "No, no, in me, together," he managed to say.

Quatre glanced at the moon sailing through the sky outside. "Later. We've got time."

"N-no-" such small movements of delicate fingers to make his hardened body arch and pulse again and again. "No, we don't. I have to...we...we have to get up early to leave tomorrow morning."

Quatre was motionless in the half light, eyes widening, then a look of love and tenderness passed between them, vivid as a touch. He let his lover's hand pull him forward, and his fingers slipped away, curving up over hips to steady. The look drew them together, body to body, as Quatre eased himself within him, completing the circle. The lines were drawn already and Trowa knew where his own led, and they led him here and only here. If he lost...if he lost the light of a hot summer afternoon, the humid air singing on his naked chest like a wild heartbeat, then he would lose it, and let the wheel turn. But he wouldn't cut the link between them himself, not for anything. The slender form in his arms started the first moves of their dance, reaffirming that link with each gentle motion, each small gasp at the taut intimate caress of flesh on flesh. Trowa closed his eyes because he didn't need them to see the lines that connected them as surely as their bodies were, and he melted into that quickening movement with a groan of relief and pleasure.

 

In a hollow deep beneath the surface buildings, Duo glanced up, a reflex that awarded him a useless view of rocky ceiling, while the senses he had attuned to the sanctuary's heart thrummed to a suddenly primal rhythm.

"Man, when does Trowa sleep?" he muttered. He leaned back towards the small chip of stone he was studying, then hesitated, and glanced around with his eyes but also the sanctuary's rocky senses. Svale? Still talking to Howard. If she left...Duo had been harmonizing with the sanctuary for a few days now. It would be an interesting test of his capacities to send a slight vibration through her wards and have her scampering to the further edges of the markers to inspect the disturbance. Not that he actually _cared_ if the two lovers finally had one uninterrupted fling, the first since they'd run into Heero. Not really. It would just be a good test of his abilities, nothing more. Yeah. 

Duo grinned and let his senses sink back into heartrock. He was getting close, repairing some of the damage. Soon Svale should be able to activate it and then things would go quicker. He had no intention of going with Trowa and Heero on their quest for whatever it was Howard thought could help build up Wing at this point. He'd stay here like a good little boy and trust they wouldn't get themselves killed. He'd be here with Svale, helping her resurrect the guardian node.

Though he would have liked to see Heero in action with Wing. Duo had cast the die on that sombre enigma, he'd like to see what numbers had come up. He had every confidence Heero could beat up some small fry...but he would like to see him in action against something more of his level. That would be hard to arrange though. And it wasn't likely to occur accidentally.

Duo felt a faint stirring in the Sanctuary around him. He couldn't read lines like the Nightwalker, but in this place so close to stone and bone, he could feel them slightly, and he could swear...something brushed him; all of their little group but particularly _him_. He felt like a line was about to intersect his with an almighty impact. Or maybe run parallel to his. Or maybe - mathematics not holding much sway over the mystical - both at the same time...

It felt like something was coming.

Duo shook his head. Probably just his imagination. 

 

Next Chapter: Now That Wasn't Part Of The Plan

Dragons make for very nasty party crashers.


	13. Now That Wasn't Part Of The Plan

"Shall I get the vision stone out for you, master?"

"No hurry, they won't get there for another six hours at best." Duo scrubbed the ends of his unbraided hair, the scent of soap competing with the smell of wet rock around him.

A few days after arriving at the Sanctuary, Duo had found this hide-out a few miles away in the foothills of the Regio range. A small spring welled up inside a sharp ravine of rock, completely inaccessible by foot. It was a good place to hide imp and his stuff, and a short teleport away when he needed a moment of solitude to retreat to. He'd brought a pallet from the bandit cave he'd occasionally slept in before, back when he was working with Fardyo. An overhang, nearly a cave, carved out by water at a time the spring was higher, gave him as much shelter as he needed.

He was standing waist-deep in the pool of water near the overhang, taking a bath. The water was achingly cold, but it was only a distant sensation to him. Besides, anything was better than bathing at the sanctuary now that Svale had lost her previous center of attention. Heero had left the day before, following Trowa and Quatre to some shady deal Howard had set up with a techno broker to obtain a piece of hardware that might or might not be related to Dragon scale.

Duo plunged beneath the water, the cold a pinching blow to his entire skin concentrated from shoulders to waist. He shivered a bit under the water as he scrubbed his hair, getting the soap out. He was grinning savagely as he broke the surface of the water, shattering its surface into silver-gray pieces of reflected sky, enjoying the thrill going through him at the whisper of a cold breeze on his skin.

Then something impinged on his senses.

Duo froze, hands raised in the act of wringing out the long strands of hair, senses prickling.

Someone was behind him...He felt it just as he heard the slightest crunch of gravel under boot. Imp was silent, hiding as it'd been taught.

Duo turned slowly and stared.

The man stared back, standing at the edge of the pool. A young man, maybe Duo’s age, slender- no, he looked slender, but his body was one long line of fine-tuned muscles on a wiry deadly frame. A hand was raised, aimed at Duo's chest. It was empty and relaxed, but a piece of metal above the wrist looked like some kind of weapon, and the threatening stance removed any doubt about it. The face was a mask of fine lines, soft curves, hard black eyes and an expression much colder than the water.

Duo slowly let his hands drop to his side. The vision didn't stir. Neither did Duo, feeling distantly enchanted in the numbness of surprise. 

Then the man, eyes fixed on Duo, took a few steps to the side towards the overhang. The weapon on his wrist still pointed at Duo menacingly. It was shaped like a dragon’s head, jaws wide and ready to spit fire. The angle at which the wrist held it steady spoke of great experience and easy confidence. 

The man reached for Duo's bag. Something red and black flew up at him with a hiss.

The man didn't blink, and Duo hardly followed the blow that backhanded imp into a nearby rock face. The man's eyes were still fixed on Duo, though the latter could feel the warrior's senses reach out behind him to make sure his small foe was no longer moving.

A hand rifled blind through the pack, knocking several items out before coming back with a small flat case. The man glanced at it briefly - Duo didn't move - and slipped it in his pocket. Duo recognized a finger-sized piece of Dragon Scale that he'd filched somewhere and was going to show to Howard. He didn't protest.

The man stood in one fluid movement that started Duo's heart beating again, and wildly. The move was one of elegant strength and killer precision, a well-oiled gun. With his free hand the stranger flicked back the short tight ponytail that had caught on his shoulder, his black hair glistening like ravens wings. He was wearing a long tunic, slit to the waist on the sides, of silken white material that fell to his knees over black trousers. The tunic closed on one side of the chest with a pattern of knots, ties and small delicate buttons in white embroidery made to look like sprigs of blossoms. 

Over the wrist of the long-sleeved tunic, the metallic weapon seemed to slither almost sensuously as it gathered up and pointed menacingly at Duo. All this time its aim had not wavered one iota. He might look young, but he acted like a seasoned, battle hardened veteran. For all he knew, he was facing a naked, helpless opponent, but he did not let his guard down in the slightest. 

\- it was pretty certain he thought Duo was a naked helpless opponent because if he had cause to think otherwise - if he had even an inkling of how incorrect that assumption was - then he’d have fired from as great a distance as he could have managed while still guaranteeing a clean shot.

Duo slowly turned to face him fully. He didn’t look at the weapon. The stranger’s weapon was completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things currently teetering over Duo’s head, ready to crash down on him. But maybe that didn't matter either right at the moment. Duo had lived so long on the edge of an apocalyptic disaster curve that he'd learned to relax and admire the view, as it were.

The tableau stayed fixed for a few seconds. Then the stranger dropped his hand slowly to his side. With a last glance at Duo - a look that was slightly puzzled as well as hostile - the man turned and jumped. Muscles flexed beneath the silken material and he darted up the rock face, using strong legs and the occasional casual hand as if he were weightless. Duo could only stare. The figure’s booted feet barely brushed rock, making less sound than the water of the spring lapping stone. Duo saw him briefly at the top of the barrier that protected his formerly inviolable sanctuary, a white and ebony shape cut out against the gray sky, then the figure dropped lightly away.

Duo swallowed.

"Imp?"

"...Is he gone?"

"Yes."

"Oh good." Imp reassembled itself with a grinding crunch of stone. "Was...was that-...?"

"That...was one hell of a hiccup in my plan."

"Was that really a High Dragon, master?"

"Hell yeah."

"...I thought they were all dead."

"Looks like Juusan missed one. Shit. _Shit._ " The mild tone belied the multi-throated scream of absolute anguish that tore his mind.

Duo moved slowly up the incline out of the water. As he moved, darkness crept over his skin, cloaking him in shapeless black with a few hard glints before twisting and reassembling itself into his usual worn leathers. His face was set.

"Well that's fucked us up real good. He's going to go after Heero." Duo's hair knotted itself into a braid neatly, water cascading down from the knots, and his hair band wrapped around his forehead like a snake coiling. "And he's going to kill him."

"Are you going to stop him, master?"

"How?" Duo asked bleakly. "Juusan is too close now, he'll pick up any major interference. And that's what it’ll take to stop that one. Che! A Dragon!" Duo snarled, smashing a gloved fist into the rock of the overhang, splintering it without thought. "Damn you, Nai No Kami and all your useless kin! If I'd known one was left I'd have _planned_ \- I would have used _him_ instead of Heero! I-... "

He sighed and gestured to Imp, who flitted over to cling to his jerkin. "Come on, let's go see the damage. Maybe there's something discreet I can do to help that might tip the scales...but I don't hold out much hope. Heero is as good as dead."

 

 

Shenlong caressed his skin and whispered in his ear. That hadn’t been the right signal after all, just a beacon from a broken helm, but he had another signal to investigate. He knew that Wing was close. He could feel it in the metal and in his bones.

Wing was up ahead, but for some reason his thoughts kept lingering behind him.

That young man...

He was feeling...conflicted. Not a usual state of mind for him. He had conviction that could wrench the sun from its course. He had the tenacity to find a few small strips of metal hidden in an entire galaxy. And one look from violet-blue eyes had split him right down the middle.

He should have killed him. People had lost respect! His clan had only been destroyed a scant year ago and already the little people were collecting pieces of gundanium armor like commemorative coins! Reason said he couldn't kill every scavenger in the galaxy, but then again, he could damn well try! Besides...something trembled in his mind, a warrior's instinct that murmured that this hadn't been some small vermin he’d left behind, something to be squashed or spared at a whim. That back there had been something dangerous. Something he should have destroyed while he had the chance.

But even as his muscles tensed to turn back and let loose a blast from Shenlong's fangs into that thieving rat...he found himself following the next signal instead. And putting some distance between himself and a memory of an odd beauty in that harsh tableau of rock, hair flowing like the water around him and eyes wide with wonder completely innocent of fear. 

A Dragon despised weakness. If the creature had cowered, blustered, threatened, tried to bargain, it’d have been second nature to leave him bruised and bleeding, or simply snuff him out. But something-...It’d been the way the man looked up at his putative executioner. Not in ignorance, no, but not in fear either, not in hope, not in despair, not-...why...every word and feeling he discarded like a blossom petal left a gap, a hole that it felt he should recognize, but he couldn’t seem to name. 

Despite having every reason to, and his warrior instincts begging him to reconsider, he could no more kill that man than he could have crushed one of the flowers on Meiran’s grave under his boot. Fine, then it was decided, done and behind him. He banished the puzzle from his mind as Shenlong tightened its metallic embrace around him and warned him that the signal had been positively identified as Wing.

At last.

The air rushed past him as Shenlong's pulse wings stretched from his back in thin evanescent strips of energy, its phase field splitting the air and propelling him through it just below the speed of sound. Soon.

 

 

"Something's coming!" Trowa snapped, swinging down his crossbow and stepping away from the vardo, lines from earth to sky clawing at his mind. Heero, on the other side of the horses, glanced at him, then around them...then up.

A black speck in the sky flashed and something slammed down forty feet in front of them, the ground warping and sinking under the impact. A flickering blue glow danced over the mistreated earth for a second and winked out. A young man stood up before them in one fluid movement.

Quatre was busy hauling on the reins and trying to bring the roan horse and the stupid horse under control. Trowa couldn't sense any lines of intent stabbing towards Quatre or himself. They were all directed at Heero. He took a few steps sideways to avoid having the horses between himself and the other, but glancing at the stranger and letting his lines dance in his senses, he was aware his crossbow was wildly inadequate.

Heero stared blankly at the man, who had lifted a menacing hand in his direction.

"You. Give me Wing and I might kill you quickly." The stranger’s tone was one of cold menace.

Heero appeared to think about this for a few seconds, then said: "No."

"Fine." The dragon head on his wrist reared and spat, and - _crack_ \- the air warped under a tremendous bolt of force aimed at Heero.

The explosion sent the horses galloping off on a tangent. Trowa saw Quatre's frightened face in a flash of golden hair as he was dragged off. "Go and stay away!" Trowa shouted after him. His lover had made him that promise as they lay wrapped in moonlight and each other last night; he would stay on the sidelines of any fight.

The man dressed in ivory, ebony and steel ignored the vardo's departure, ignored Trowa as well. He was striding with stiff steps towards the figure blown several feet back by the explosion-... and then he stopped.

Heero was struggling to his feet, blinking, hand frisking dust and debris out of his hair. Trowa stared at him in disbelief. He appeared completely unharmed.

Their attacker kept the dragon’s head pointed at Heero’s chest. "You appear to have some small ability. Who are you?"

"Wing is mine." Heero flexed his arms, glaring a very realistic death threat at his attacker.

"Fool. You don't even know what you have. I'm surprised Wing doesn't kill you on the spot rather than let you soil it longer." The fine lips curved into a sneer.

Heero glowered.

Wing, which Howard had activated in case the techno dealer tried to pull a fast one, exploded from him in shards of metal, which orbited him sharply before clamping on to his arms and legs. The hair piece lanced out a beam of light which curved until it flickered over one eye.

Trowa was becoming fairly adept at reading the cold planes of Heero's face, and thought he had been surprised at Wing's reaction, though not nearly as surprised as his attacker was. The man blanched and stared, lips drawn back in a feral snarl. 

Wing ripped through the leather on Heero's chest - Trowa noted with clinical detachment the demise of yet another one of his spare jerkins - and shaped itself into its protective shell.

"You...who - are - you?" The voice was almost a growl, black eyes gleaming with anger, hatred and desperate longing as they fastened upon the armor slicing through the jerkin.

"Wing is mine," Heero repeated firmly, fists clenched as he glared back. "No one will take him from me." The beam of light before his eye flickered and he frowned, obviously finding it distracting.

The warrior straightened slowly. "My name is Chang Wufei, I bear Shenlong and I beg to differ." He smiled coldly, and metal sprang up from his waist, wrists and neck to slide down his clothes - without harming them, Trowa noted sourly - to wrap him in steel protection, glinting with blue and white reflections like slices of sky, iridescent pools of light flickering here and there.

Trowa took one look at where the lines were going, and saw that his own intersected none. This was obviously not his fight, he would not be able to do much here anyway. He turned and loped off in the direction the vardo had taken. At least he could make sure Quatre was all right and not in any danger in this area that was known for its predators and highwaymen. That was the sort of danger he could deal with. They would creep back together and try to keep an eye on the fight from a very safe distance.

 

Duo was the only spectator left, hiding close to where he’d initially teleported a hundred feet away. Close enough to send some small magic into the mix if it looked like it could make a difference. He noted Trowa's departure and grinned at the shaman's wise decision. Good, one less person to worry about. Now, the stranger had said his name was Chang Wufei. That rang a bell, and that was not good news. He looked young, but Duo was ready to bet that he'd been at the top of the Dragon's hierarchy before they were destroyed, and that meant only one thing as far as Dragons were concerned: he was one hell of a fighter. Despite Wing's apparent acceptance of its new owner, he didn't think highly of Heero's chances.

 

Next Chapter: Wing And Shenlong

Sitting in a tree. K-I-S- nah, too many punches for that.


	14. Wing and Shenlong

Black eyes traveled slowly and unhurriedly up and down Heero's frame, lingered over the hard, stubborn face. Light flared out of the small headpiece caught in the fine black hair, overlaying the newcomer’s right eye with dancing light. Finally the Dragon smiled, a small movement of the lips that didn't reach his pupils.

"I could give you one last chance to hand over Wing, but I don't think I'll bother," he said, and his mecha roiled and rustled over his skin. On his other wrist, metal coiled and shaped itself into a second dragon’s head. "I'd be wasting my time. There's only one way this is going to end, right?"

Heero glared at him and balled his fists, but made no other move to prepare. Wufei stared at him for a few more seconds, analyzing, then-

Both dragon heads shot off their energy bursts. He'd not even cocked or aimed; the deadly ripples of air arced and homed in on Heero from two different directions, the crests of two waves of force that crashed into him. They hurled him forward to meet a hard fist punching towards his gut as the Dragon launched himself a second behind the power surges and rammed into his adversary with practiced brutality.

Duo had been expecting something, but his jaw still hit the ground at the intricate, deadly move- and at the fact that Heero, though knocked onto his back several feet away, was still gamely climbing to his feet, a hand rubbing his abdomen gingerly. This time Duo had seen it; a blue-white flicker in the air like static snow that had erupted briefly at the points the Dragon had struck. Wing. “It’s not just the metal bits,” Howard’s voice droned on in Duo’s memory (who back then had only been partly listening to boring techno stuff). “The Gundanium mechas carry an energy charge that shields their owners, and their interface allows them to warp and bend to it their will. Defense and offense- are you paying attention, kid?!”

Duo was paying attention now. Yes, Wing was shielding Heero, had been doing so even when it was quiescent, when Wufei had first attacked him. Interesting.

Wufei had made no move to follow through. He appeared intent on studying his adversary. Which made it likely those had not been serious strikes but mere probes to judge Heero's abilities. Great. 

"Imp?"

"Master?"

"Grab onto me, 'kay? It suddenly occurs to me we might need to bug out of here very quickly if that Dragon really loses his rag."

Imp glomped Duo’s wrist in silent but whole-hearted agreement, and continued to stare at the contest before them.

Wufei was circling Heero slowly, eyes dissecting him where he stood. Heero glared back but seemed in no hurry to attack. Maybe he doesn't know how to, Duo thought suddenly. He can beat up monsters real good, but he might not be sure how to fight someone who's armored like himself.

The Dragon's restraint surprised Duo. He’d always labeled them as primitive brutes of the 'nuke it first and scrape it up later' school of fighting. Unless...Duo suddenly wondered if the fact that Wing had apparently accepted Heero as its owner had changed the fight’s meaning for the Dragon, from the quick extermination of a thief to a combat among equals. Dragons dueled for social rank - and possibly for the sheer fun of it, they were kinda weird, Duo sniffed internally - and they had rules for that sort of thing. The fact the Dragon had given Heero his name indicated this might be a proper duel in his eyes. Chang might also be afraid of damaging Wing, although considering all that the mecha had been through before getting this far, it would take a frightful amount of force to dent it. All this might give Heero a little bit of an edge. Or it might just mean he was going to die slowly and painfully instead of quickly and painfully.

Wufei lunged forward and launched a quick flurry of punches at Heero, who finally began to react. So far all he'd done was dust himself off when getting back up again. Now he was dodging, eyes intent on his opponent's movements.

Duo remembered the fight with the bandits. Heero wasn't one to take the offensive, you normally had to touch him to set him off. That could be a problem for the future. Assuming he was still alive to face it. 

The Dragon was still probing, but his intent was lethal. A punch slipped through that would have crushed Heero's skull near the temple if Wing hadn't shielded his head. Heero staggered, balance lost. Wufei followed through smoothly and without hesitation, fist punching into his enemy's abdomen. Duo winced as Heero fell to his knees. 

The other fist swung up and over and down towards the nape of Heero's neck to finish him, a killing blow applied with almost clinical detachment. 

Duo was on his feet, hands darting out, but he needn't have bothered. Heero fell straight towards the ground under the blow as if he’d felt it coming, rolled swiftly away from an instinctive kick to his ribs, rose to his feet and fell back into a defensive posture.

Chang was once more circling him, eyes narrowed. As he stepped over a broken rock, a flicker of blue ran over his armor and sparked the air around him. 

"Nai No Kami turn me into a worm!" Duo suddenly hissed. "Did you see that, Imp? Did you? The light on Chang's armor?"

Imp found itself ripped from the sleeve and squeezed in a fist, thrust towards the scene of battle.

"Wh-what? His armor is flickering like Heero's-"

"Yes! It should only be doing that when someone strikes it!"

Imp stared up at Duo's jubilant features. The hand gripping it ground it in tense excitement, then banged it distractedly against the rock as another of the Dragon's strikes impacted on Heero and sent him reeling back. Imp was thankful that it wasn't a living creature that could actually feel anything. It would be tough to be Shinigami's familiar otherwise.

"Don't you get it, Imp? This Shenlong he's wearing, it's unstable! Damaged!"

Imp didn't know if it liked the sound of that. "Is it going to blow up, master?"

"No! Well...I hope not," Duo amended. He didn't know that much about Dragon Scale armor. Hadn’t Howard said something about critique? Er, no. Critical? Going critical? Hadn’t sounded way healthy. "Hopefully it won’t explode. But it does mean he can't use it at full potential. Heero might have a chance!"

"Why isn't he using it?"

"Er... "

Duo brought his attention to the fight again, in time to see Heero step back from a flurry of very expert blows, one step, then another. Wing spat and flickered under the assault.

"Come on, Heero, don't space out on me now," Duo muttered. Wing's energy shield protected Heero, but it was more like padding than an aura of invulnerability. Heero had to be feeling those blows, and hurting. Despite the tension, a small part of Duo couldn't help but be fascinated with the skill and grace the Dragon exhibited as he took Duo's designated champion apart with smooth, deadly strikes. Chang Wufei was young, early twenties perhaps, but he'd obviously been a warrior since the earliest age. He still wasn't taking any risks, stance ready to defend even as he backhanded Heero - his adversary staggered - then spun and swept his leg up in a vicious kick to Heero’s side that sent him crashing into the ground.

Heero scrambled up again gamely. But then he just stood there. It was an odd pose. Hands by his side. Head slightly down. It almost looked like Heero was giving up. 

The dragon seemed to hesitate, his fists twitching. But the look on his face wasn’t pity, it was disgust. He mouthed something to himself. _Unworthy_ , if Duo had to guess, though he was a bit too far for accurate lip reading. Then he hurled himself at Heero, the intention to finish it clear.

His fist hammered into Heero full-force.

Behind his rock protection, Duo's hand formed magic in a hopeless attempt to cast a shield, knowing that even Wing wouldn't resist that blow-

There was a solid hum and a shower of small sparks - and a ripple of force around the Dragon's target.

Heero had collapsed to one knee under the force of the downward blow to his head, but...he was alive. 

Duo stared in amazement. So did the Dragon.

Heero's head was bowed almost to the ground and he was shaking it slightly, but by all rights he should be dead. Duo blinked, trying to process what had happened. He'd seen a glow, felt a wall of force surge around Heero, it had-

"You..." The Dragon was staring, and he seemed to know what had happened.

Heero slowly lifted his head, but he didn't look at the man standing dangerously just above him. He negligently wiped the trickle of blood running down his chin, and stood up. Wufei fell back a step, eyes narrowing, armor crackling and spitting like a cat.

"Hn." The grunt sounded satisfied.

The Dragon snarled. On his wrist the metal dragon head suddenly pulsed with power and Wufei punched, fist propelled by Shenlong’s energy, straight at Heero's chest.

There was a solid noise tinged with the skittering crackle of Dragon Scale energy.

Heero had moved like lightning and was holding Wufei's fist.

He slowly lifted his head - he hadn't even been looking, Duo thought, dizzy - and finally stared at his adversary.

"You are very good.” It wasn't a compliment, it was a statement of fact.

Wufei tried to rip his fist away, but it was caught in a steel trap, Heero's hand squeezing slowly. The seasoned warrior didn't even blink. The second dragon head warped the air around it with a surge of power as the left fist shot out towards Heero, quicker than the human eye could really follow-

Another crack.

Heero had caught the second fist too, almost casually.

Cobalt blue eyes stared into deep black. "But I have what I was missing now."

Muscles beneath Wing's partial metal protection suddenly flexed and Wufei staggered slightly.

Heero’s lips moved a fraction upward in something that might have been a smile.

"Now it's my turn."

Powerful arms jerked Wufei forward and down, and Heero's armored knee rose up to ram into the Dragon's torso. Wufei twisted instinctively, but his movements were limited by the captured fists and the blow still landed true. The Dragon did not make a sound though. He continued to coil, knees bending then springing back, and a savage twist wrenched one fist out of Heero's grasp. Heero’s eyes widened in surprise. Wufei’s arm swung up on the follow-through to hammer into his adversary’s forearm. Wing spat and flickered, and Heero staggered forward half a step under the power of that blow. For an instant his grip on the second fist loosened and the Dragon hauled it away.

Duo watched, mouth dry, as the opponents fell a few feet apart, eying each other warily. Wufei was rubbing his abdomen and his body language spoke of pain. Heero was the same as always, though Duo thought his stance looked slightly cautious. Apparently the Dragon had surprised him. The look was dousing the slight flicker of hope that had started to burn in Duo's heart. Heero was a lot better than he'd thought, and very impressive, but...but this was a Dragon, a born and bred killer - warrior, Duo corrected himself, as a slight feeling of admiration, completely unwelcome, flashed through his mind. Even damaged, that Scale of his, Shenlong, was a part of him and he could use it to full capacity.

"You're trying to sync with Wing." The Dragon's eyes were fixed in hate on Heero. "But you are not one of us. You have not earned it. How dare you!"

Heero cracked the knuckles of one fist, eyes fixed on the Dragon. "Wing wants me to."

"What?" Wufei sounded more puzzled than affronted.

But if the Dragon wanted a better explanation-

Heero leaped forward, fist swinging. His opponent fell back a step, arm shooting up to block instinctively. The blow caused a cascade of white sparks from Shenlong and shoved Wufei back a foot, boots scoring the hard ground. The Dragon dodged the next two blows, and took another on the shoulder as his own fist swung at his attacker. Heero spun and his leg snaked out, crashing into Wufei's side and driving him to one knee. Heero - who probably didn't know what fighting fair meant - continued in the momentum of the spin and brought both fists, locked together, hammering down on the bent form.

A burst of sparks and light, and the Dragon wasn't under that terminal blow anymore, he was a few feet away, suspended in mid-air. Duo stared, jaw hitting the rock below. Wufei was _hovering_ at head height, energy pulsing under him, before flickering out and dropping him to the ground.

"Dragons can fly?" Imp squeaked, surprised.

"Only the best...Oh man, if this Chang’s armor wasn't damaged, Heero would be cat food by now." Even with Shenlong damaged, Duo really couldn’t tell which way the fight was going to go now. 

Heero dropped into an aggressive stance, but seemed to be waiting for the Dragon's next move.

Now if it had been Duo fighting that relentless Yuy machine in Chang's place, he'd have turned tail and run at that point. Duo was fully conscious that his life was very, very important in the scheme of things, and however powerful he was - the extent of which no one else was fully aware of - he knew from first hand experience that there were things stronger than he was out there. He wouldn't have attacked an unknown quantity like Heero without thorough investigation first. In short, he'd have used his usual tactic - run and hide - then watched. Analyzed. Then, as discreetly and quietly as possible, he would have destroyed his target in the most subtle and underhanded way possible, staying in the shadows and giving his enemies no clue as to the full extent of his abilities. This was instinctive to him, ground into his very bones by six years of careful hiding, plotting, observing, preparing...Duo could only stare in bemusement as the Dragon smiled, nodded in slight acknowledgment of the challenge, and leaped at Heero like a bullet.

Brave...stupid, but brave...

Blows rang, energy spat and crackled. The two figures dodged and weaved in a growing cloud of dust that was rising on the crest of the static generated by the Scale. Duo tried frantically to follow the moves - his fist squeezing poor Imp who put up with it good-naturedly - and decided that, despite everything, Heero was definitely holding his own. He hadn't even used his sword yet. He still had that to rely on if he felt pressed.  
Heero dodged and retaliated viciously, and the Dragon went staggering back several feet, hand clutching his shoulder.

Duo started to grin, the Shinigami smirk. "He's got a chance! He's actually got a chance!"

Heero leaped forward, fist swinging again and, before the Dragon could fully recuperate, the blow went crashing into his chest.

Shenlong screamed. Its owner was still stoically silent, but the fist had plowed through the energy barrier and scored open the flesh beneath. Blood and shards of armor peppered Heero's arm. Wing's master immediately struck again, but the Dragon managed to dodge that blow and fall back again.

"Heero-" Duo's face was tense, eyes shining like beacons of excitement and hope. "Heero, if you win this, if you _can_ win this...I'll worship you! You- I’ll give you my- my support, my powers, my brains, my body, it’s all yours.”

Imp wrinkled its minute brow. "I thought he didn't want it, master."

“Let a guy dream, willya?” Duo said with a distracted snicker, most of his attention on the battle. 

Something like a shot rang out and Wufei gasped. An intercepted blow had cracked Shenlong's plate along his forearm. His face had paled as if the bone had been shattered instead of the armor, but still he didn't cry out.

Duo's smile flickered.

Heero pressed the attack, relentless. The Dragon managed to dodge and send a blow crashing into Heero's thigh. Heero staggered almost to his knees - Wufei swung down a fist on a wave of energy, aiming to break Heero's neck, but an arm as solid as the bones of the earth shot up and blocked, barely shivering under the strength of the blow. Wing's slivers of light danced briefly. Heero shot up to his feet and struck the Dragon twice. Shenlong blocked some of the force, but enough got through. Wufei staggered and this time was unable to fully dodge the two-handed blow that crashed into his shoulder. He went down with another pained gasp, but still no cry.

Duo's face twitched slightly, eyes wide. The trademark light-hearted grin seemed painted on, his eyes were like glass.

Something was happening to Wing. Even without any blows, energy was rippling up and down Heero's arms, and suddenly his punches were even fiercer, quicker. Wufei, dazed, on the defensive, could only block and let Shenlong soak up the damage, but it was obvious even to Duo, who didn't know that much about mechas, that it couldn't do that for long.

Heero stepped back two paces, air warping around him, and lifted his arms -

\- for an instant the scene froze. Wufei looked up at those hard fists aiming at him with something like acceptance. Duo felt even the mask of his smile slip.

Raging force erupted from Wing's wrist guards, picked up the Dragon and sent him hurtling fifty feet away to crash into the rock face on the side of the road. Dust billowed as the form slumped, though a hand still scrabbled at the ground in reflex.

"Mother Earth! Those things are hard to kill!" Imp gasped, amazed, but glad that against all odds its master's candidate had apparently beaten his foe.

Dust rose like a funeral bonfire as Shenlong crackled and its energy field whipped the air futilely...and died.

Heero was staring at his wrist guards in surprise. Duo realized that the surge of power had been instinctive, born of Wing's programming and its owner’s wish to strike, and had taken Heero more by surprise than it had the Dragon.   
Heero glanced up and his eyes narrowed at the form in the billowing dust. He slowly raised an arm.

Quatre isn't here to stop him this time, Duo thought. And it wasn't Heero's nature to let a fallen enemy live. It was more thoroughness than cruelty, but it was just as implacable.

The memory of a look of acceptance, almost of peace, flashed through Duo's mind.

Imp suddenly found itself plastered against Duo's jerkin as its master shoved it against his shoulder, freeing his hands. "Hang on, Imp. Things are about to get crazy."

Imp clung on for dear life and felt the brush of a teleport field sweep over them. Good! They were obviously not needed and it was high time to get out before something blew up in their vicinity.

Power rippled along Wing's plate, and Heero's eyes widened at the response. He smiled again. His eyes were hard and uncaring as they centered on the still form - and fired.

The teleport field - feeling strangely warped - wrenched Imp twice and nearly shook off its hold, but then they were gone.

 

Smoke and rock dust flared out from the blast area. Heero covered his mouth with his forearm, coughing. Then he moved forward. And stopped.

He heard footsteps behind him and turned quickly. Trowa raised his arms and flinched, but Heero dropped the fist he'd raised instinctively and nodded in recognition.

Trowa approached, eyes still wide. He was glad Heero was alive but he rather wished Quatre hadn't been witness to that display. They'd dragged the horses and the vardo behind a rock outcropping some distance back, and had caught the tail end of the fight. When Trowa saw where the lines of battle and fate were going, he'd tried to get his young lover to concentrate on the horses, but Quatre had still seen the cold execution of Heero's attacker.

...Or had he?

"Where...where's the body?" Trowa came up to Heero's level and stared at the rock face, blasted and partly melted and blown into the road in lumps from the size of his head to smaller than his fist.

There was a lot of rock, but no bloodied, mangled remains.

Heero looked as puzzled as he was.

 

The whoosh of displaced air caused ripples on the surface of the cold water near Duo's hide-out.

Imp dropped its death-hold on its master's leather jerkin and flew unsteadily to a nearby rock.

"That was scary! But at least your candidate won, so we- Master?!"

Imp nearly shrieked as it turned around and saw that Duo was still kneeling, carefully holding to his chest the still form of the bloodied Dragon.

"What are you doing?! I thought Heero had killed it!"

"Yeah, well, that would be a pity, right?" Duo's hand ghosted over Wufei's head in the crook of his shoulder, feeling the deep wound in the black hair freed by the shock against the rock. Then he scowled at the injury in the sturdy chest. Shenlong had absorbed some of the damage, but the Dragon was still in bad shape.

"But-but-" Imp was buzzing around like a fly on caffeine.

"Damn, this is bad," Duo muttered, his hand back on Wufei's head. "Come one, **Ryu** , don't croak on me."

"...Do you want to kill him slowly later?" Imp hazarded, clutching at straws.

"What? No!"

"But he tried to kill Heero!"

"He _tried_ , but he didn’t, he wasn't able to." Blue eyes gleamed like cruel, cold jewels as Duo carefully lay Wufei down on the pallet and applied his hands to the chest wound. "So even if he comes back, he won't be a problem for Heero. And in the meantime..." Duo glanced down at the still form beneath his hands, hair loose and glittering like torn raven feathers, black eyes closed. "I'm sure I can have some use for a High Dragon. He's the last of his kind, Imp. He's unique. You don't carelessly throw away something this rare."

Imp landed on the Dragon's shoulder cautiously, and watched Duo's hands apply healing magic to the gash. Its flint-black eyes were sad. Last of his kind, unique...Imp shook its head. It wasn't its role to try to understand Shi No Kami.

"I can work on this wound, master, if you want to concentrate on the head injury," the little piece of sentient rock offered. It was rewarded with one of its master's rare real smiles.

 

Wufei was dead. He knew that. Darkness saturated everything, a texture in and of itself, muffling him. He was drowning in it. He was almost grateful...

"Come on, Dragon."

Hm?

"Don't give up on me."

No. No fair. No fair! He was dead! Someone couldn't still be counting on him for something!

There was the slightest glimmer of - not light, but another current in the darkness. Like black velvet reaching out for him, caressing his skin. Something that wasn't part of death, though it was a close relative.

No. Enough. Don't want...

The voice was a distant threnody with weird echoes throbbing through some of the words. “No, there, stop that bleeder. Dalaan dei messene, issey. Powerful, yes, you can taste it in his blood...like sunshine on steel...Saanesa dei! If only I’d known there was one left-...Hey, quit that, Imp, he’s not got much hemoglobin left as it is.”

Then the voice was back in his ear, soothing in the darkness. 

“You can't give up...Come on, pretty Dragon, listen to me..."

Ah. Really? ‘Pretty’, was it? Well, he might be dead, but he was still going to find the person who'd just said that to him and kill him.

"That's it. Come on. Man, Heero sure did a number on you. It's hard to believe, but he might actually have a chance against Juusan."

Something wrenched in Wufei's soul. A frenzy. It threatened to tip him piecemeal into the darkness of death as it sent his body clenching, his heart squirming and thundering...But the touch of velvet and the scent of rocks and earth, clean and cool, wouldn't let him harm himself in his anger any more than it would let him slip peacefully away. 

"Come on, now, cool it, you’ll rip something open...Hmm...I can't heal this from the outside, my beautiful Dragon." 

Damn it! Stop calling me that!

The velvet curled around his arm, slipped up sensuously to his neck, cradled his aching head, trying to soothe away the pain.

Pain? Damn it, maybe he wasn't dead after all.

"Shhhh."

The voice made him angry, but it was also...soothing. Warm. There was something else in that voice. A feeling. It made it hard to ignore it even though he wanted to. 

"Shhhhh. Listen to me."

No. Go away.

”I know it hurts. Trust me I know...” 

Now the voice was not talking about the ragged wounds on Wufei’s body. And there _was_ something there, something that ached in time with his own pain.

It felt...indescribable...to finally find someone who knew this pain.

"Yeah, I know...I can help you. I can take the pain away, I can fix you and give you another chance. Your only chance as a matter of fact."

...Take the pain away? _All_ the pain?

The darkness curled around his aching forehead. A hand, he realized, soft and gentle like that of his barely remembered mother.

"But for that you have to let me in, my striking, terrible Dragon. Let me in. I only want to help. I'll only heal your injuries, I promise. I'll make it all better..."

Wufei found himself sinking into that touch, that voice...It promised him...he didn't even know what anymore, but he wanted-...

"Let me in..."

A soft feeling on his forehead, soothing, touch of fingers as gentle as a kiss...

_Let me in..._

Wufei opened the door and let himself sink into the different darkness with tentative hope that maybe the promise in the voice would make it really all better...some day...

 

Next Chapter: Three Views On The Event

It sucked, it sucked, and it _really_ sucked.  
Also, did someone mention ‘Zero’? What’s that? Doesn’t sound too bad.


	15. Three Views of the Event

Howard jumped as two fingers snapped in front of his sunglasses.

"Wh-what?"

Duo snapped his gloved fingers again. "You spaced out on me, Howie. Stay awake now, I need your magnificent brains here."

"But-...a Dragon!"

"Yep, real live one. Real live wire, too. And really quite pretty, though man he hated it when I said that. Powerful package all in all. Were they all like that?"

"Er, yes, pretty much."

"Damn, for the first time I almost wish Juusan hadn't squashed them like cockroaches."

That got him a fearful glare from behind the sunglasses, but he ignored it. Howard humphed and turned back towards the worktable where he was examining a piece that had fallen off of Shenlong. Then he glanced over his shoulder, remembering a detail.

"That's right, your races were enemies."

"That's an exaggeration." Duo shrugged. "They resented us and we thought they were amusing little monkeys."

"Oh, right, an exaggeration," Howard muttered. "So why did you save him?"

Duo's gaze remained crystal clear and guileless. "I don't throw away truly powerful things, Howard, especially if it's the last of its kind. He might come in handy one day. Even if he's only a loose canon, he might give Juusan a headache."

"Duo...Um, there's something you should know," Howard said hesitantly. "He's not the last Dragon. There are a few others scattered around, and some of them have banded together. They're riffraff for the most part. It sounds like you saved the last High Dragon though. Maybe if he joins the others...maybe their race can be salvaged."

"Great, I just single-handedly saved the Dragons. Slap me with a medal and call me Louise. Can we talk about something other than those primitive idiots please?"

"But those remaining Dragons, they're, well, they joined-"

"I don't care what a bunch of barely evolved mechanized monkeys do, Howie. I want to talk about the Zero system."

"You what?!" Howard completely forgot about Dragons or warning Duo that his uncharacteristic act of mercy might have, in fact, made his worst enemy stronger, and concentrated on the fact that Shinigami had gone completely insane. "What do you want with that horror?!"

"That horror, as you call it, is a very powerful weapon and an amazing arcane device," Duo said reprovingly.

"It's an abomination! Why do you want that?"

"I was there when Heero fought the Dragon. And it was...weird. That reminds me. Howard, this Chang guy said that Heero was trying to sync with Wing. What does that mean?"

"Sync?" Howard thought a few seconds. "I'm not sure."

"He was pummeling Heero, who was pretty much just standing there and taking it like an idiot. Then the Dragon let loose a blow that should have killed Heero deader than stone. And instead, Wing just gave this massive surge of energy which-"

"Fuck, who the hell is this kid?!"

"I'm sensing this now rings a bell."

"I'm not sure, but it sounds like he's linked himself to Wing."

"The thing's been draped all over Heero since that time in the Mater," Duo said tartly, remembering that at the time he'd briefly envied a mecha. "What do you mean by linked-"

"Not the same thing. Up till now, Heero has been using Wing as a piece of armor, a tool. But the gundanium mechas can be so much more than that for Dragons. They can link themselves with their user's life-force, and allow him to use it as instinctively and completely as his body. The ultimate fusion of mind, body and machine. It's the heart of what Jusan killed them for, because it's a pretty scary and powerful ability if you can push it to its logical conclusion. It's very hard though, only the strongest and most skilled Dragons can achieve this after considerable training and preparation. I find it hard to believe your boy managed it so easily."

"It wasn't easy." Duo was frowning, a worried look in his eyes. "Heero must have felt that he hadn’t fully mastered Wing yet. And he just let the Dragon practically kill him to bring out its best. Just like that. There was no doubt or hesitation. It's like the guy has no consideration for his life at all. Or anybody else's for that matter...Still, there's something missing, Howie."

"Well yes, Wing is damaged, and there's stuff that was removed -"

"No, I mean in Heero."

"Yeah, I'd say there's a lot missing in Heero, particularly between the ears."

"You should have seen it." Duo ignored the comment, eyes turned inwards. "It's like seeing a tsunami just stand there, waiting for the coast to hit it in the face so it can retaliate. He fights instinctively once he gets started, but there's that moment, that instant of...of placidity, of waiting. I can't describe it, but he-...he reacts instead of acts! Like he's learning as he goes along."

"Well, that's not necessarily a bad thing."

"It is when he'll be facing Juusan," Duo said, voice tight and eyes darkening. "Juusan strikes first and then that's the end of it. You don't get to retaliate with the Scourge. Trust me, I know."

Howard was silent, unable to find anything to say to the depth of darkness and pain momentarily visible in Duo’s eyes, and knowing that Shinigami reacted violently to pity or any kind of friendly overture anyway. Then his Techno brain kicked in to high gear, the part of him that didn't give a rat's ass about other people's emotions and problems.

"Is that why you want the Zero system? So that Heero can do all the 'reacting' and such before the first blow even lands?"

"In a nutshell, yeah." Duo nodded happily, good humor painted over the abyss.

"But Zero was destroyed when Jusan attacked Iwanohone, wasn't it?"

"Aaah, that's what I thought." Duo smiled like the cat that had broken through the perimeter fence, killed the guard dogs, beaten the security system and picked the lock to assassinate the canary. "But then ol' Svale said something funny the other day, about one of her pals and something he's been studying. I got curious." Probably one of his defining characteristics, Howard thought, along with cold calculation and ruthlessness. "I did some research. The man has a copy of Zero. And - get this - he actually did what I was barely beginning to wonder about. He integrated it with a prototype mecha!"

Howard's jaw hit his worktable and he actually removed his dark glasses to stare at the grinning young man. "You're kidding!" he finally gasped. In his revealed eyes, a few qualms were blown away by the lashings of overwhelming curiosity about mechanics that had made him one of the leading Technologists in the galaxy. Hooking the Zero system into Wing?! What an awesome challenge...

“I still need to determine if it's true, but it seems to be." Duo nodded enthusiastically. "Of course I feel like killing the bastard for polluting an arcane wonder with something mechanical-" Howard's glasses fell back on his nose and he glared at Duo through the panes "- but then I found out that this guy himself could be very useful to our little plan. All in all, we can't lose!"

"Bringing together one of the most powerful arcane devices with the most powerful techno one?" Howard tried to sound cool, but a little tremor ran through his voice. He wasn't going to stop Duo from trying this because the gleam in Shinigami's eye showed that he'd made up his mind. Besides, Howard was curious. But he reminded himself queasily that his young friend did not have his entire sanity at his disposal, last time he checked, and though there was a good reason for that...it was Howard's job to be the voice of reason when necessary.

"Put it this way, lad," he said slowly. "If we are going to try to do this...losing is something we definitely cannot afford to do. Or Jusan may not be the worst problem on our hands after all."

 

The moon's light slithered slowly over the stone curves of the sanctuary's roof. Trowa, Quatre and Heero had returned a few hours ago. The techno dealer had not had much to sell after all. Trowa and Svale were in their usual spot where they could discuss important matters without interruption.

Trowa watched the waning moon as he recounted the fight. He finally concluded: "It's strange because Heero seems so adverse to anything mechanical. Yet he mastered this Wing thing without any problems. Well, very few problems."

"He's got an aptitude, I guess!" Svale was drinking again, but she wasn't yet comatose. "So why are you worried?"

"Who says I'm worried?"

"My hand, which has been kneading your pretty thigh for -"

"Svale!"

"-the last minute. Ouch, okay, no need to get violent. Respect your elders, kid."

Trowa sighed and ran his hand through his bangs. "I am worried, Svale. We know nothing about Heero."

"The lines of Center led you to him. He's the one who is meant to face the menace threatening the planet, or she wouldn't have set your lines intersecting."

"Yes. That line was portentous enough to measure up to that task, I know that much,” said Trowa, a rare frown of worry creasing his brow. “It was a line that marched in parallel to our greatest stories, tales of loss, defeat and sacrifice for victory. I found Heero at the end of it. And amazingly, he's agreed to fight the Scourge with barely a question. No question at all to be exact and that's another thing. Maxwell mentioned it, and he's right, Heero never asks questions."

"Trowa, when you look like that, you don't need questions. You just click your fingers and anybody will fall into your bed without being asked!"

"That wasn't the kind of question I was thinking about. How much have you drunk already?"

"Not enough to miss something else...Heero never used his sword during that fight, did he?"

"No."

"I wonder why not?"

"I asked him, but he didn't answer. Personally I think he was testing himself."

"It's a good thing he's a fast learner then."

"Hm-mh. But it's not as if he let his attacker teach him anything. I don't know why he paused before attacking, it was as if...as if he was trying to figure something out, but by himself. He wasn't trying to learn anything about the fighting style of his opponent or his- okay, Svale, I'll stop worrying about it if you take your hand off my ass."

"You have really lost your sense of humor, boy."

"I just hope that's all I lose."

 

 

Wufei hazily stared up at the sky for a minute. Then he sat up gingerly.

He had a bad bruise across his chest - and his soul ached at the damage done to Shenlong who had tried to protect him. He also had a large aching bump on his head.

...fists like steel...unimaginable power...Wing...And darkness, soft and comforting...A hand taking away the pain...a gentle caress on his forehead...

What the hell had happened?

For a few seconds he doubted it was real. If it had been, then the bruises and bumps should have been fatal wounds. But the state of Shenlong confirmed it, it had really happened. Wufei felt his soul wither.

In the bleakness of failure and raging anger, a memory of words sank like stones.

Heero sure did a number on you...He might actually have a chance against Juusan...

The man who'd taken Wing was an enemy of Jusan.

Wufei was left reeling on the lips of the abyss. Thoughts he'd never considered - never had to consider - flashed through his mind.

Wing is mine, it belongs to the Dragons! But Jusan...but...

Strength.

That was the iron law of his race. You rallied to strength.

Wing was his. This Heero wouldn't recognize that.

“I'm sorry, Meiran. I am forced to choose between two evils, and I can't even say which is the lesser. But I can't give up Wing.” The thought suddenly blossomed into a new certainty, strong and relentless. The forcefulness of the conviction caught him by surprise, but it gave him a purpose, a reason to keep breathing, another chance. He grabbed it with both hands.

Wing was too important. Meiran had shown him that, and she had believed in progress more than fighting or revenge. Wufei’s race had died for that Scale, dammit! He couldn't leave it in the hands of a stranger.

He stood and looked around, and realized with some surprise that he had been laid out near his Ether-ripper, camouflaged a few miles away from the first beacon he'd followed in the mountains. The small spaceship, which could be used as a planet hopper in a pinch, looked like a stub-nosed fat-bellied airplane, as aerodynamic as cheesecloth but it could get him to where he was going within a few weeks.

How the hell did he get here? Who-...He could remember Heero, in fact the image of that man was burned into his brain as well as his flesh. But who had saved him? Who had healed him? Shenlong's overlay blinked before his eyes. He'd only been unconscious for a little over a day. Someone had to have repaired his injuries. His armor was now too damaged to regenerate his body. Damn that Heero...

Something flickered in his mind, behind his anger. A soft touch that had seemed somehow...ominous. And the way the man had pronounced the name of the Scourge. Not Jusan; he'd said Juusan. Juusan. What did that accent remind him of?

It slipped from his mind along with the memory of the voice and the touch. Some healer or other do-gooder. The man hadn't hung around for thanks, so screw him. Wufei had more important things to do and people to kill.

He glanced back from the hatch of the Ether-ripper.

Heero. Once Shenlong was fully repaired, Wufei would be back and he’d show the cur what Gundanium mecha and fighting were really about.

 

Next Chapter: Drumbeats

Quatre is really too nice.  
This state of affairs is officially ending soon.


	16. Drumbeats

The drums rang out, an almost palpable vibration bucking the air. Fire blazed and the dancers screamed, voices enslaved to the beat of the man-high drums. The noise rolled like thunder from the four corners of the stone circle.

The tramp of feet and wild ululations seemed to push the drummers, stripped to their waist, sweating and grinning like fiends, to greater efforts still.

"Are you sure?" Trowa asked. Quatre read the movement of lips more than he heard his lover’s voice.

"I’m sure, but you go ahead and dance. I'll stay here with Heero," he yelled.

A shake of the head and an arm gently pulling the healer against his hip was the only answer Trowa gave him. Quatre started to protest and the arm squeezed, tender and warm. He felt a bit guilty. He knew Trowa, quiet and retired though he seemed, enjoyed occasionally cutting loose and turning his body over to something other than his fine-tuned control. But Quatre also knew that Trowa didn't enjoy doing things if it didn't include him. Quatre could insist all night, but Trowa would just smile and hold him closer. It did look fun...Quatre wished he wasn't so...shy about moving like that. His eyes lingered on a gyrating figure at the center of the ring.

"Duo seems to be having fun." He spoke loudly to be heard over the drums.

Trowa leaned his chin against Quatre' shoulder and snorted. "If he has any more fun he'll be causing a riot."

The lithe black shape was dancing. Sort of. Quatre thought he knew what dancing was, and this wasn't it; it was more like taking the music and doing something highly inappropriate to it. And very alluring. Quatre could never in a million years do anything like that. Which, considering the number of people circling and staring at the swinging figure, was probably a good thing. Duo was already good enough at getting into a mess by himself, he didn't need Quatre adding to the display. It was a good thing Trowa insisted Heero stay with them, because this might eventually turn into a fight.

Heero turned and glared at yet another person - a young woman this time- who'd asked him for a dance. He wasn't getting into the spirit of things. It was a wonder he accepted to stay. But he rarely did things of his own volition if fighting wasn't involved, so he passively stayed where Trowa had parked him, leaning against a stone pillar. His eyes flickered across the packed ring full of dancers with sublime indifference. The woman hesitated, glanced at Quatre -who smiled weakly in apology - and left with a shrug.

Quatre's eyes turned back to Duo. He was wearing his customary black leathers and boots, and a black velvet ribbon was knotted into his braid instead of the usual thong. He was grinning like a demon. As the healer watched, he flexed his knees, back straight and hips slightly forward, and started to sway, in a swinging motion of legs and braid that made Quatre's face blaze and his eyes twitch away. Never in a million years...but then again, with Duo out there, no one would be looking at a stiff, barely moving blond. And...he'd seen Trowa dance a few times before, and...any amount of embarrassment would be worth it to see that again.

Quatre's eyes drifted from Trowa's strong profile, caught in flickering fire light, back to the ring. Duo was dancing pretty much as before, but a bolder dancer had broken through the circle of curious or admiring watchers around him and was dancing with him. A tall light-haired man, fairly muscular, in a shimmering green shirt and riding leathers, one of the nomads who used this break in the tundra for rest and recreation in their long travels. He was grinding against Duo's backside, matching him move for move. Quatre's eyes flinched away and he wondered if his hair was going to catch fire. But he found his eyes dragged back reluctantly to the scene. Duo had his hands on the front of his hips now as he let his knees flex lower then straighten again in a twisting move so graceful it seemed to embody the wild drumbeats and flickering flames. He was grinning at his companion over his shoulder, a feral smile matched by the other. Damn, there was really only one way that Quatre was going to get through the evening without looking at that any longer.

"Okay, let's try it," he shouted, and Trowa looked down at him with pleased surprise that made his lover grin. "I just need to go change my shoes." The tramp of beating feet was almost as loud as the drums; he would swap his thin sandals for his riding boots and avoid having to heal his own toes before the evening was out.

"That's okay, stay here," he added as Trowa made to move with him. He let his eyes flit towards Heero, and Trowa nodded reluctantly. They didn't want to leave the unpredictable fighter alone. That was why they'd dragged him off with them when they decided to make sure Duo didn't get into any trouble during the night's festivities.

Quatre ran lightly up the steps of the stone ring, built generations before by the nomadic people of the tundra for their regular reunions and festivals. He glanced back. He could see Trowa smiling after him, body swaying gracefully to the wild drumbeats. Heero stood next too him looking bored. They'd have to keep an eye on him, even if they wanted to have some fun. Or maybe Duo could-... Quatre looked for their friend who surely had to be getting tired after two straight hours of pounding the ground and flinging himself around like a maniac. He caught sight of him at the edge of the group of dancers, disappearing into the darkness followed by the young nomad he'd been dancing with. So much for keeping an eye on him! Or him keeping an eye on Heero. Quatre was surprised, but then he smiled. Oh well, at least he'd be having some fun. It was high time Duo gave up on Heero and started meeting other, more approachable people.

Quatre took his light steps towards the vardo. The darkness was mapped out by torches lit at various points, road signs in the mutable huddle of caravans and tents that surrounded the festival ring.

They'd been traveling for two days now and would arrive tomorrow. Howard had made quite a fuss about their travel plans. It was true the planet hopper could deposit them at Fen's doorstep in less than an hour. But Heero wasn't the only one who didn't like technology. Quatre and Trowa preferred to take the vardo and follow the lines of the earth; on Center it was still the safest mode of transportation. The arcane planet of Sources was unpredictable at best, and its natural background magic frequently interfered with the working of technology. They could ill afford to be caught in a freak EM storm or whatever lethal surprise the planet might come up with, especially if they were carrying a very dangerous arcane device on the way back. It wasn't as if time was a major issue. Jusan wasn't going to arrive for many months yet. They had time to get this 'zero' spell the safe way, while letting Heero practice against the occasional monster or bandit they met on their road.

Quatre found their caravan and ran up the steps. He wasn't sure he liked the sound of this zero thing they were going to get. Howard had mentioned it a week ago, shortly after the fight Heero had had with that strange, dark-haired young man who had inexplicably landed right in front of the vardo. It sounded interesting; an arcane device that would allow Heero to use Wing a lot faster (that was what Quatre had taken from Howard's long, technical and downright boring explanation). Svale had been curious until she heard who owned the thing, and then she'd put her foot down. Quatre tugged absently at his bootlaces, remembering the argument.

 

\---

 

"No! No way! Fen's a nice guy, we're not going to bug him for this! Especially if he's doing research on it!"

"But Svale!" It was, strangely enough, Duo who took up the fight as Howard hesitated, looking almost relieved at the objection. "If he's a friend of yours, why should he mind if we-"

"He's a very old friend. We go way back," Svale snapped.

" ...So?"

"So he's very nice, and very good with arcane research, but he can be a bit fuzzy about...details."

"He's so senile, he doesn't know which day of the week it is," Duo translated. That got him a rap of staff on the head.

"You'll respect your elders, boy! Fen's a good man, but he's very eccentric about his research. We're not going to bug him and that's final!"

Duo rubbed his head and glared at the crone who'd turned back towards the center of the cirque. Svale had started reactivating the Jishin Sanctuary, and life was getting very interesting for its inhabitants. Walls and doors and windows had the strange habit of disappearing overnight. Floors too, on three memorable occasions. Hazy blue and green lights were starting to shine from the various stone circles and doorways, though they always disappeared as soon as someone went to investigate. The stones marking the ley lines around the sanctuary would move like iron fillings following a magnet - once more, when no one was looking. You would turn around and they would look as solid and immobile and innocent as only stones could, despite having shifted ten feet away from their previous position. Trowa was getting massive headaches from the shifting lines around the buildings, and would glare at the stones until Quatre feared he would pass out. As soon as Quatre distracted his lover, the blighted things would move again.

Svale would dodge any questions, either by bopping the speaker with her staff or groping him, depending on who it was, and acted like she was in perfect control of the situation. They had their doubts. It was true that so far no one had gotten hurt, and nothing very menacing had happened. But the strain was telling on them all. Duo in particular looked like he could use a good night's sleep. For some reason Quatre couldn't fathom, the awakening of the sanctuary was apparently stressing him even more than Trowa. That was probably why he took the unusually aggressive step of standing between Svale and the cirque's hearthstone.

"Look, you old mummy, don't blow me off like that! I've got my word to say here!"

"And why is that, Maxie?" Svale's eyes could have cut diamonds. "Why are you still here and not twenty parsecs away and still running? You know who and what the Scourge is."

Duo blinked, caught off guard. Howard snorted though. "Svale, the kid may be young and flighty - " Duo glared "- but he's not dumb. He knows that the effects of Jusan destroying Center will be felt throughout the known Ether. Our whole civilization is on the brink of destruction, or at least some massive restructuring. And if Jusan's the one in charge of the remodeling, I, for one, would look on with interest but only if I could find a cozy hole to hide in, preferably in the next galaxy."

"Yeah." Duo said, nodding sharply. "If this Fen guy has something that can help us against the Scourge, we should go all out to get it, kill the bugger if we have to, and-"

"No!" Svale suddenly looked very dangerous, but it passed quickly, and she bopped Duo's head with her staff again. "You're a poster child for mayhem, aren't you, boy. But Fen is not the kind of person you can annoy with impudence, even if he is old. He has-...means...Look, it just wouldn't be a good idea. He's much safer pottering around his ruins studying gods know what. And we're all safer too," she added in a mutter, and refused to be further drawn on the subject, even when Duo tried again two days later in cut-off shorts and a tank top.

 

\---

 

It had taken a week after that to talk Svale around and get Fen's location from her. Quatre didn't think she would give in at all, she was a stubborn old mule. But this Jusan thing was bigger than, well, anything. As the Scourge got nearer and the arcane readings and fortune casts started getting very perturbed and weird, Svale's resolve had crumbled.

Finally she'd made them promise that they would do nothing more than ask. Fen was an arcanist, he should be able to feel the disturbance in Center as well as anybody. He would probably not mind helping them and give them a copy of Zero. But if he did mind - Svale had drawn herself up to her full height, which was hardly worth the effort - if he said no they were to leave it at that and vamoose. She glared at Heero, then at Duo who had looked like he was about to protest. They'd had to agree.

Quatre smiled as he pulled on his second boot. He was very glad that they'd agreed. It would be nice to go somewhere with Trowa that didn't involve bloodshed at the end of it. In the past few weeks they'd been off planet once - Howard's ship could rip Ether if it had to - and to a techno exchange fair, and both times it had ended in a fight. It hadn't been much of a challenge for Heero, who was beginning to scare Quatre just a little bit in his unrelenting ability to cause havoc. The challenge was to stop him before he killed the hopelessly outclassed thugs that had attacked them.

The vardo swayed and Quatre glanced up at the entrance in surprise. He was expecting Trowa, but his smile was just as warm for the black-clad figure who staggered in on the echoes of wild drumbeats from outside.

"I'm finally having some fun tagging after you guys!" Duo shouted, his vibrant presence filling the vardo. He crashed into the small wooden chair near the window and grinned at Quatre.

"I'm surprised to see you," Quatre said, blushing slightly. "Where's your, er, friend?"

"Him? Good kisser, but I don't know, not really that interested." Duo leaned his chin on one palm and glanced out the window, eyes on the night sky. "I think I've been spoiled, can't seem to settle for...well, that guy for one."

"Still thinking about Heero?"

A curious look crossed Duo's face as he stared at the stars, then he shook his head violently, braid whipping across his back. "Pff, I should get my head examined. It seems I like them hard to get. Or impossible. Or not even worth getting in the first place."

Quatre stared at him uncertainly. There was something strange about Duo tonight. He was practically radiating heat from dancing like a fiend, yet the only thing Quatre could feel from him with his empathy was...cold. It was surprising, yet somehow familiar, as if he'd always felt it in Duo but could only now sense it clearly.

It was a harsh feeling. And it hurt. Not just Quatre, but Duo too. Except the cold had numbed him so badly he couldn't even feel it anymore. A blizzard of ice...wind blowing cold and howling and screaming like thousands of voices...Quatre's thoughts made no sense...He found himself staring into blue eyes bordering on violet, that were looking into his own as if they could read his thoughts scrolling across the back of his head. The perpetual cheeky grin had changed into something older and harder.

"I'm not a very nice person, you know. You shouldn't feel sorry for me."

But I do, thought Quatre, eyes fixed on the violet color, tracking the pearls of blue and gray in the irises, drifting into the pupils as if pulled into a black hole. I do, Duo.

"You shouldn't. I've done some pretty bad things. Granted, I had a very good reason. But I doubt that's much of an excuse in your books."

Bad things? Quatre couldn't feel that in his friend, he could only feel the numbing, killing cold. He couldn't tear his eyes away from Duo's pupils and he couldn't say anything, though he wanted to.

"You're too nice Quatre. You try to reach out to everybody. Like you're doing now. But you shouldn't."

I want to, I want to reach out, take away the ice from your heart, you shouldn't have to bear that alone...That was the feeling that screamed through Duo, gregarious, charming, affectionate Duo. A soul-tearing isolation from others. He was stuck far from them, in that blizzard.

"You really shouldn't, because people can abuse that kind nature of yours so easily. They're some really bad people out there, Quatre. They'd hurt you just because they can, just because you're so nice."

But you wouldn't, would you, Duo?

Duo?

"No. I'm going to hurt you because I have no other choice. And because you're so nice you made it easy for me. I couldn't get near Trowa, and I can't afford to use Heero, so..."

Quatre couldn't see anything but the dark pupils, until he realized that no, he couldn't in fact see anything at all. The vardo's comforting interior had vanished and he was hanging suspended in darkness, staring at the world through two small holes the size of Duo's eyes. Through them he could make out a few images, small and warped; in the tiny vision the smiling young man leaned towards a golden-haired figure sitting, stunned, on the edge of the bed. He saw Duo put his hands on either side of that small figure, and whisper in his ear. Quatre strained to listen, but all he could hear was a distant beat of drums, light and thready and very different than the wild percussions accompanying the dance only a few hundred feet away. He couldn't hear what Duo said, couldn't feel the touch of lips brushing his ear or the breath causing his hair to rustle. He could only watch as Duo's hand lifted to caress his cheek with the back of two fingers, carefully, like someone trying to calm a wild bird that he'd caught and wanted to cage without harm. Then the fingers cupped his chin and Duo smiled at him. There was sadness and slight regret behind the cruelty. Quatre watched, helpless, even his thoughts and feelings gummed up in the muffling darkness.

A finger in the low-cut black gloves rose to Quatre's forehead and touched him for a few seconds. Then Duo grinned, something like his old smile, and rose, dropping a kiss on Quatre's head as he stood, before turning and walking away.

Quatre suddenly started screaming in the darkness. Then the vision cut out and all was gone.

 

It had been less than ten minutes since Quatre had left, but suddenly Trowa twitched and turned towards the stairs.

"Heero, stay- no, on second thought, come on, let's both go." Leaving Heero alone here was not an option.

Heero stared at him in the flickering firelight. Trowa glanced down at the dancers. He'd seen Duo pull his willing prey away, so there was no point staying here if Heero was willing to come with him. There was no reason to feel worried, of course; Quatre hadn't been gone that long, but Trowa felt a sudden urge to-

"Here I am!"

Trowa spun away from the dancers to stare at Quatre clattering down the stone stairs, out of breath from running from the vardo.

"Are you alright?"

The question escaped Trowa before he could stop it, and he couldn't for the world understand why. Quatre looked at him quizzically, and then he flashed the usual small tolerant smile he used when Trowa was caught fussing over him. Trowa knew that he himself would find his worrying annoying, but Quatre accepted it as the signs of love they were, with the depth of understanding and intelligence that was in his heart.

"I shouldn't have let you go by yourself," Trowa murmured, hand on Quatre's arm. He knew his lover could handle himself in a fight - and Quatre knew he knew this, Trowa had taught him after all. But Quatre didn't like confrontation.

Clear blue eyes looked at him in surprise as they caught his words through a momentary lull in the drumbeats. "The tundra tribes have always treated us like friends."

"Yes, but there's a lot of alcohol flowing tonight, and tempers are running-" he glanced at the ring where a few dancers took advantage of the changing of drummers to disappear off into the darkness in pairs "- a bit hot."

Quatre grinned. "I didn't meet anyone intent of molesting my tender person. They're all too busy having fun." The drums were starting again.

Strangely enough, Trowa found himself tracking Quatre's chakra lines as he said that, making sure he was alright. He couldn't do a very good job without Walking, entering a meditative trance, but he could at least see that Quatre was unharmed physically and mentally. His lines of focus were a bit shaken - possibly from the anticipated embarrassment of dancing soon - but no more. Why...why did Trowa feel like looking deeper?

"Where's Duo?" Trowa asked, and he didn't know why that was the next question that escaped him either.

Quatre smiled as he blushed and dropped his head. "Erm, well, I think he kinda left-" then he stopped and stared at something past Trowa's shoulder. The shaman glanced around. Heero, who hadn't moved at all from his position against the stone pillar, had lifted his arm to point.

Trowa followed the gesture. There was Duo, in the act of snagging another dancer and insuring that every inch of their respective bodies were properly introduced.

Quatre looked in confusion to Trowa. "I thought I saw him leave with -"

"Mustn't have been his type," Trowa said. His eyes picked out the tall figure of the nomad who had followed Duo previously. The man was at the edge of the circle, having a drink and looking...dazed, but also happy. Surely not-...not in ten minutes. The man wasn't looking at Duo, it was as if he'd forgotten his existence. He was too far for Trowa to read his lines. Maybe he was drunk?

Quatre coughed and blushed as he stared at Duo's display; he was grinding his body against the shapely form. His choice was lean but with feminine curves, wild black spiky hair, pale skin and the look of the devil in her eyes. "I- I thought Duo preferred men," he said weakly.

"Love, Duo prefers them with a pulse and that's about as picky as he'll get," Trowa said into the pink ear beneath the golden hair. Quatre went red.

Trowa frowned slightly at the dancing braided figure. He was keeping a careful eye on the man, much more than he let on even to Quatre. Duo was constantly defying analysis. The shaman felt pretty sure Duo had no preferences when it came to desire. And he seemed to have the appetites of a normal young man, or at least that's how he acted. But the only person he'd seriously tried to seduce had been Heero, and he'd long since given up on the sombre, dangerous man. Although Duo seemed to admire and flirt with some of the people they'd met on their travels, like he was doing tonight, he'd never gone through with it. Trowa had the feeling it was something of a game for Duo...maybe even an act. Surely he couldn't be that hung up on Heero? Either he was very, very picky...or he had something else on his mind, something pretty important. Trowa had tried to draw him out about this before. Duo had joked and evaded, and pretended to run after some hunk in the inn where they were staying at the time, only to return quickly and quietly when he assumed Trowa had forgotten about him, to go to sleep alone. It was strange.

Over the three months they’d known him, Duo had proven solid in a fight, knowledgeable about many subjects, fun loving and light hearted, but serious when needed...someone they’d come to rely on and consider a friend. He trusted them to fight at his back against the creatures and bandits who’d jumped them on occasion, maybe one day he would trust them enough to let them help with whatever weighed on his mind, or so Trowa hoped. But it wasn’t in his nature to pry. Duo knew where they were if he needed them, in the meantime his secrets were his own.

In the ring below, Duo had grabbed another dancer, a slender man his own age dressed like a caravan driver from the eastern lands. Duo's hands rose to gather black hair out of oriental eyes as the man smiled at him. Hands lingered on leather-clad hips. Quatre blushed and Trowa smiled. Well, well, whatever troubles hounded Duo, they looked like they were taking a break tonight. The way Duo was dancing now, the message was pretty clear. This one was a keeper; Duo was not going to go to sleep alone tonight.

Trowa looked down at Quatre to share his thoughts, and forgot the slight sense of wrongness he'd had about the healer, the mystery that was Duo and just about anything else. Quatre was swaying his hips ever so slightly to the new beat the drums were picking up, still soft, but soon they would be crashing and beating like their hearts during love-making.

"Did you say you'd not met anybody intent on molesting you tonight?"

"Yes," Quatre answered, distracted as his wide eyes followed Duo's sensuous display.

"Well, we'll have to fix that."

"What?"

Trowa's rare smile brushed his lips as he dragged his lover into the ring. The night was young and the music made the blood pound, they could dance to start with. Later...maybe Heero could be persuaded to go and sit on a rock, his favorite hobby after fighting, and he and Quatre could put the vardo to good use. No reason why Duo should be the only one having fun tonight.

 

Next Chapter: In Search Of Destruction

For once, the gang can go on a visit that doesn’t end in violence and destruction. Right? Um, right...?


	17. In Search of Destruction

Heero was walking with a steady pace that ate the miles, brushing up the dust of the little-used road as it curved into the Birdcry mountains. He seemed to hardly ever sleep, yet never seemed tired, which made him the exception on that particular morning. Quatre and Duo were yawning every other minute and Trowa was wondering if they should take a mid-morning break and maybe a nap, when a bend in the road revealed their destination.

The fortress had been cut from the sheer rock of a massive cliff. Parts of it had crumbled, but the central building was still intact. The road ended twenty feet from the door and plunged into a massive ravine. A drawbridge allowed access to the open gate. From the way the chains were rusted to the pulleys, the bridge had been lowered for ages. The gate was metal streaked with rust, permanently jammed agape.

They stared up at the massive building. Crenelations, buttresses and bastions melded with the cliff far above their heads. Half way up the sheer face of the main walls, a man-high heraldic shield, which had once proclaimed to the world who owned the imposing fortress, had long crumbled into oblivion, leaving the place nameless and soulless. It didn't look friendly.

"Right, remember, we're just asking. No violence." Trowa said sharply, looking severely at Heero, who ignored him, and at Duo. The latter nodded slowly, eyes on the grim gray rock looming above them, seemingly cowed. He didn't look like he was going to start a fight. Good.

At the same time as the group entered the hold's forbidding portal, another set of doors opened and closed behind a lone, wounded Dragon, sealing his fate.

\---

The stubby-nosed Ether-ripper eased through the EM curtain which isolated the bay of the city-sized warship from the harshness of outer space, sealing in the cold, thin air smelling of engine fuel, exhaust and metal. The ship settled onto landing platform A1, like a cheap toy in the echoing vastness of the bay meant for drop-ships carrying thousands of infantry troops.

A circle was forming around the small vessel, disparate armored men making fantastic silhouettes in the gloom of the dimly lit bay.

The hatch of the 'ripper hissed open and unfolded into a gangway, and a proud figure descended to the shadow-ridden platform, his eyes a much deeper darkness.

Many in the circle of predators shifted and gaped in recognition, but none dare break rank.

Wufei walked to the edge of the platform, ignoring the many eyes on him. He dropped off lightly, scorning the stairs, and headed unerringly in the direction of the bay's exit. His people had helped build this vessel, and he'd been a frequent visitor to the Libra in the past five years, he knew where he was going.

He didn't stop as he approached the edge of the circle hemming him in, even when a man a good two heads taller, heavily armored in gleaming Gundanium, took a few steps to get between him and the door.

"Where do you think you're going, Chang? I won't-"

Wufei barely flicked a finger; a wave of force picked up the burly man and sent him staggering sharply back, where he tripped and fell over a box of spare parts. The box cracked and broke under his weight. Bolts clattered and rolled on the metal floor around him.

The circle flinched, hesitated. Wufei carried on walking as if nothing had happened, idly nudging a few bolts away from his path with his boot.

"Who the hell is this clown?! Grab him!" an officer shouted, hurrying up from deeper in the hangar. He was also tall, with a striking blond mane of hair set in three braids. Glittering techno shields covered lean, rangy muscles. His tattoos proclaimed him to be from the tribes of Makesh. They were known for their bravery in combat and their berserker fits in battle. They weren't known for their intelligence or survival instincts.

Wufei's steps slowed marginally.

"Come on, you idiots! What are you waiting for?!" the man gestured towards the lone figure. But rather than gang up together, the men around him took a few steps away from him and from the approaching bloodied figure.

"What are you cowards doing?" the man snarled. "Why are you -" the circle around him was widening quickly.

"Because they're Dragons," Wufei said quietly, flexing a wrist without looking at the Makeshi officer. "They know I won't kill one of my own kind, however tempting." His scathing eyes were resting on the Dragon he'd felled as the muscled brute groaned and rubbed his back, sending a few more bolts clattering across the floor. The man flinched beneath the dark glare.

"Own kind?" the blond stared at the wrist rising towards him. "Wh-"

"You, however, are fair game."

The dragon Fang’s blast followed the disinterested words as they lost themselves in the bay's vastness.

One of the Dragons moved forward, idly wiping away a splatter of blood and less identifiable substance from his scale armor, obviously regretting his lack of foresight at not moving away from the loudmouth sooner. 

"Cha- lord Chang? Um, what- what do you want here?" 

"I need to see Jusan," Wufei said, the words dragging themselves out reluctantly.

"Er, I need to- I mean, I serve-I will have to ask- I-"

"He already knows I'm here," Wufei said coldly. "If he wanted to stop me, he would have. He certainly wouldn't have relied on that pathetic display back there. Is that all the Dragons that have rallied to Jusan's command?" Wufei swung back and speared the Dragon warrior with a scowl.

"Er no, there are two groups on missions right now. There are three hundred and fifty eight of us altogether, sir. Um, but no-...you are the only High Dragon left."

Wufei's eyes were like shards of glass. "I know," he said, and he wondered if he was really going to be able to go through with this. But he had to. Rally to strength.

Strength. It was the Dragon's war-cry, the theme of their short, bloody history. They had never conquered other races for profit or glory, but to strengthen their children, sharpen their teeth on the bones of war. And if the conquered were strong enough and had fought well, then their elite could join the ranks of the Dragons too. They were expected to. Rally to strength, join the ones who were strong enough to conquer them. It was the order of things. The conscripts weren't slaves, they fit into the clan in whatever position they deserved. The Dragons were not picky about race or provenance, birthright or blood. All that mattered was strength, which was determined by carefully ritualized duels. That and the type of Gundanium armor they were strong enough to wear determined their place in the hierarchy of the clan and nothing else. If the armor mastered was one of the rare Gundam mechas, the highly evolved armor that adapted to the body, mind and life-force of their wearer, then they were High Dragons, the lords of the clans, the future war leaders.

Rally to strength. The Dragons had served Jusan for several generations before Wufei was even born. When it came to strength, he was the power in the galaxy. They served him as mercenaries, attacking the planets he indicated. Jusan's motives were always a mystery, there was no real rhyme or reason behind most of his attacks that the Dragons could discern; he wasn't really interested in the plunder that rewarded the other mercenaries he hired. Neither were the Dragons, they were more interested in testing their strength and recruiting the best of the conquered into their ranks, growing stronger. All in all it was a good arrangement.

...Had been a good arrangement.

And then Jusan had turned on them with, as far as Wufei could see, little provocation. Apparently the development of the new generation of Gundam mechas such as Shenlong had displeased the Scourge. The clan had been warned to stop. They refused. They were hired by Jusan, but they had not sworn allegiance to him. Their duty was to themselves and to what could make the clans stronger. The Dragon elders assumed that Jusan would not compromise the relations he had with his most efficient strike-force just because he didn't like their armor. It didn't make sense.

And they'd developed Wing.

And Jusan had come upon them like the Scourge he was.

And now the Dragons were the conquered. And Wufei was left reeling in the void which had once been populated by his wife, his family, his clan. Adrift, he only had two things to cling to.

The rule of his people - rally to strength. And get Wing back.

//Wing?//

Both Dragons tensed, Wufei's lips curling automatically into a snarl.

//Wing, is it? Is this the reason for your visit, Wufei?//

Wufei swung away from the other warrior and marched with firm steps towards the command center. Fuck you Jusan, keep out of my goddamn thoughts! he snarled mentally.

//Then you will have to hurry here so I can talk to you in person.// The mental tone was urbane, smooth and ever so slightly amused. Deliberately taunting, Wufei thought, though with the Scourge you could never be sure. Jusan did like his head-games.

//It's about the only thing that really entertains me anymore.//

Jusan!!

//Oh I'm sorry. Did I intrude? I can't believe I'm being so rude to my guest. If I can call you that after you barged in on my ship, injured one of my officers and started tromping around the place like you owned it. You're right on the limit that separates guest from intruder, my dear Wufei. And since the last time we met you threatened to...how did you put it? Stuff me down a black hole? You can understand why I'm-//

" ...somewhat curious about what could be going through that fascinating mind of yours," Jusan finished as Wufei slammed back the doors to the inner sanctum.

They stared at each other for a few seconds, then Wufei stiffly and reluctantly bowed his head a scant whisker. Significant, nonetheless. Jusan's eyes lost nothing of the gesture.

The sanctum was pretty much as Wufei had seen it last, well over a year ago. The walls were the same undecorated metal bulwarks as the rest of the ship. There was no furniture apart from Jusan's chair. Objects were strewn here and there on the floor in no order the human mind could comprehend. Their owner however wasn't human and was very particular about anyone touching his collections, finding his own kind of sense in the apparent chaos. Apart from Jusan's curios, there were no decorations or attempt to make this room, which he rarely left, homier. Jusan had no need for comfort or luxury, hell he didn't even need a physical form. Yet he had always materialized when he was with Wufei, something he rarely bothered to do for most of his servants or enemies. Although he was glad to not have to deal with a disincarnated power-house of arcane force, Wufei wasn't sure he appreciated the distinction. He wasn't sure he appreciated anything about how Jusan had treated him: from the first moments Jusan had insisted a fifteen-year old Wufei, among all the Dragon mercenaries that worked for him, serve him personally...to the last, to the point where Wufei was now the only High Dragon left in the galaxy after the Scourge had wiped out the clans a year ago, sparing him.

Wufei tore his eyes from the objects strewn across the room - mechanical puzzles for the most part, Jusan's passion - and fixed his gaze on the tall form sitting in his high-backed chair in the center of the sanctum, chin in one hand as he watched the unexpected visitor. Jusan always chose the same physical form, at least when Wufei was around. A tall sandy-haired man with a patrician face and calm clear eyes crowned with slightly spiky eyebrows that added a touch of the demonic to his appearance. But only a touch. The Scourge preferred to look civil.

"So, Wufei." He seemed to caress the name rather than speak it and Wufei felt his hackles rise in a well-remembered wave of resentment. He'd served Jusan personally for five years as his attaché, his liaison to the Dragon clans, his personal killer and as a war counsel when he'd gotten older. He'd never gotten used to the creature or his strange mannerisms though, they riled him as much as the first day they'd met. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"You've already read it from my mind," Wufei snapped, glaring. The warrior who'd escorted him had fallen to one knee in front of his master, and was staying there until he was given leave to rise, but Wufei had never bowed to Jusan and, outside of his slight earlier acknowledgment, wasn't going to start now. He wasn't going to be polite either. Not to the creature who had murdered Meiran, his friends and his race after countless years of their serving him loyally.

Jusan's eyes dropped ever so slightly. "Yes, that will always be between us, won't it," he said softly. There was something like sadness in his tone. More head-games, Wufei thought savagely.

"As such, I'm surprised to see you here, Wufei." The tone was serious now, and straightforward. Eyes watched him carefully.

Wufei took a deep breath, released it slowly. Reminded himself that he really had nothing to lose.

"Except your life, Dragon," Jusan whispered in answer to the thought.

As I said. Nothing.

"That's a bit nihilistic even for you, and that's saying a lot, you were hardly a bundle of laughs to begin with. Why are - what happened to Shenlong?" Jusan's eyes were suddenly focused on the metal visible through Wufei's ruined white tunic.

"I found Wing. It has fallen into the hands of one who is your enemy. A particularly strong one. He did this," Wufei said without further delay.

"Who?" Jusan's eyes were suddenly very careful. Wing was no joke.

"I honestly don't know. His name is apparently Heero?" Wufei raised an eyebrow but the name seemed to mean nothing to the Scourge. "He's on Center."

Jusan's body was an act of will and as such under his absolute control, so no emotion was apparent on the handsome face. But Wufei thought he felt a slight...unease in Jusan's aura. A strong enemy wearing Wing on Center. Even Jusan had to feel a prickle of alarm at that combination.

"I will have to look into that. Why are you here?" It showed how much Jusan was concerned if he was willing to skip his usual games to get to the point.

"I want Wing," Wufei said in a restrained voice that still seethed with passion and fury.

"Wufei..."

"If you let me get Wing I will swear my allegiance to you." 

There, he'd said it. Behind him, the kneeling Dragon shifted, tensing in sudden fervor. The lower class Dragons who had survived the massacre and had chosen to rally to the one who had conquered them, had lost much in the way of pride and honor. To have Chang Wufei, the last High Dragon, the bearer of a true Gundanium mecha, join them and lead them...it would be a revival, a resurrection.

Jusan was silent, and Wufei could feel a slight probe ripple the currents of his thoughts. Normally the touch was not perceptible unless its owner wanted to dig.

"I find that...surprising. Though not as much as I would have thought..." Jusan's finger caressed the hilt of the saber he always materialized at his side. It was one of his toys and Wufei knew it well, very well. It had been at his throat about a year ago. He tore his eyes away from it and focused back on Jusan's steady gaze before memory could rise up and murder his resolve.

"I want my race to survive. For that, I need Wing. Shenlong is too damaged." And Wing was the pride of his race, the banner, the new heart the Dragons would need to regain their strength and honor, but he didn't feel like admitting those reasons to Jusan; odds were the Scourge would not understand them anyway. "I will...accept your rule under those conditions, as the Dragons who already serve you do. Our clan rallies to strength. When you destroyed the High Dragons, you proved yourself the strongest. The very tenets of my race say that I owe you my allegiance. If you help me get Wing, I will swear myself and the remnants of my people to you, to your service. We will comply with your requests, we will only develop the mechas you grant us, you won't have to cut us down again. In exchange I want my people to be able to grow, to develop, to continue in the traditions that made them what they are." Even if it costs me my soul.

"But you'll have Wing." Jusan's hand smoothed the material of the clothes he wore, vaguely reminiscent of a uniform, in pale blue and gold.

Wufei knew that was going to be the stumbling block-

-and the next words came out of his mouth unbidden, as if someone had prompted him.

"And will you fear me then?"

There was a coiling in the air, like a snake drawing itself up to strike. Jusan stared at him, unreadable. Wufei realized the quandary that his remark had put Jusan in. If the Scourge decided Wufei could actually be a threat to him with Wing, then Wufei's life was forfeit. But that would be such a dreadful admission to the creature, to concede that a single mortal, however armed, could endanger him...Wufei felt his heart sing as he realized he'd finally reached a position where he could wring what he wanted out of Jusan and the galaxy itself. Or die trying, and rejoin Meiran and the ranks of the former High Dragons in honorable death. Either way he came out ahead, he thought darkly.

"I guess those terms might be acceptable." Jusan stood slowly and took three graceful steps towards the dark-haired young man. The Scourge put his hands behind his back and bowed his handsome head for a few seconds, and then said in a near whisper: "Wufei...you know that I will have to -"

"I know," Wufei snapped, straightening his back and lifting his face proudly. "Get on with it."

The air seemed to rustle and solidify around Wufei as the Scourge approached him; Jusan's aura was nearly tangible this close up, and he was actually hiding the greatest part of his strength and his power in an attempt to seem less threatening, more human. Wufei did not know why he bothered. He always saw Jusan for what he was; an insanely powerful creature with enough magic to put civilization to the torch and an attitude to match...yet no more worthy of awe, respect or politeness than the next weapon of mass destruction.

//I think that's why I like you...// The thought caressed him gently, echoed by a finger lingering over his cheek. Wufei did not flinch or even appear to notice the finger brush his face up to the forehead. The hand followed the finger, unfolded lightly on to the line between golden daylight skin and the night of Wufei's tightly bound hair.

_Pain_

And more. It was like every spec of his nervous system was being ripped out, flayed, then stuffed back into his aching body, his screaming mind. At least the Scourge was making it quick; Wufei didn't want to linger in the thoughts and the memories being ripped from his mind as they were scrutinized and judged. Meiran in a field of flowers, torn body motionless as it had never been in life-...the towers of the colony that had been his home, burning, such bright flames-...the feel of Jusan's sword against his throat as Wufei threw his life away on the infinitesimally small chance of killing the Scourge, the murderer of his family, of his race-...the horror and the shame as he not only failed to score a blow on the powerful creature, he wasn't even killed for the attempt-...Jusan's clear blue eyes and slight smile as he let him go...It all passed in a flash.

Wufei bent slowly at the waist, only his will, stronger than any Gundanium armor, keeping him on his feet. From a long way away he saw his hands grip his thighs as he bent over them, straight-legged, shuddering and sobbing under the onslaught of the Scourge, but still standing...

The force scouring his mind for any hint of treason, of duplicity, lingered over more recent memories; on the image of Heero striking him down like a force of raw destruction...on the way Wing meshed and bound itself to the stranger... on...on...Wufei blinked tears from his eyes, wondering why something seemed to be missing. 

Jusan poked and prodded. Images flashed by; an apparently young man with old eyes behind a strangely weightless waterfall of bangs, crossbow swinging -...innocent blue eyes, hair like sunlight and a spirit to match, hauling on horses' reins -...and-...and-...a thief, a scavenger - nothing to worry about - eyes like - hair flowing like - something-...Jusan dug deeper and Wufei's heart squirmed in his chest as if trying to rip away from the pain of the flesh and mind, but still he stood standing.

The pain had eaten away at his cells; he was now a creature of agony in the shape of a man. As the pain ebbed, he felt as if he were disintegrating. He could barely feel his feet - but he was still standing, he knelt for no-one. A hand brushed his aching head, soothing - what-what did that remind him of-...? He'd forgotten-...how could he forget-...? The hand dropped to his shoulders, straightened the body he could barely acknowledge or control.

He felt the hand brush his throat harrowed by screams, and a warm glow soothed some of the rawness of air rasping into his lungs. Something nudged his legs behind him; Jusan had materialized a chair for him. Wufei ignored it. 

The black spots were fading from his eyes, and Jusan, face impassive and eyes strangely guarded, swum into view.

"Shh, it's over. Apparently you were telling the truth, Dragon." Wufei realized that his white silk tunic had been repaired, the cloth stitched as if it had never been torn, wiping out blood and dirt and making the snowy material shine. "You do not have the strength of mind to hide anything from me, and you have no duplicity anywhere in your feelings."

You should know - Wufei's thoughts were as raw and painful as his throat - you dug into them deeply enough.

"Yes. I'm...sorry. You understand that I had to be sure. The pain will fade in a few minutes. Here, sit down."

Wufei slowly bent at the waist again, bracing himself against his hips, legs apart and locked at the knee. "F-...fuck you...Jusan."

A brief smile flashed across the cold lips. "Have it your way then and stay standing. I swear by my eternal life, Wufei, you are the most pig-headed member of an extremely stubborn race. You." He addressed the Dragon warrior still kneeling behind Wufei. "Prepare a room for Lord Chang, and then go tell the men they have a new war leader."

"Repair Shenlong," Wufei rasped.

"Pardon, what?" Jusan looked back at him urbanely.

"Don't need a room. Repair Shenlong. I'm going back to Center."

"You've barely arrived. What's the hurry?"

Wufei just glared.

"Prepare the room," Jusan said firmly to the man near the door and then walked back to his seat.

"Don't get excited," the Scourge told the fuming Dragon. "I need time to repair Shenlong. And we have time, Wufei." Jusan sighed, eyes dimming. "We have months before this ship will reach Center."

The reason why the galaxy was still intact was because a powerful magical mass like Jusan could no more zip around the Ether than a black hole could leapfrog a small sun. Any attempts to rip Ether with Jusan aboard ended in a mighty sub-spatial mess and a thoroughly destroyed ship. The Scourge was reduced to inching along at regular FTL speeds. This meant that though he had been traveling for years and was now quite close, in spatial terms, to Center, he would still not arrive for quite some time.

"I'm not waiting aboard the Libra until you get there!" Wufei snarled, straightening and glaring. "My Ether-ripper can be back on Center in two weeks-"

"I know you're in a hurry to get a rematch out of that 'Heero'-"

"I'm not serving you until I have Wing!"

The Scourge sighed with a show of weariness. "Very well, very well. So you're not my war leader, you are my guest for the next few weeks until I can repair Shenlong. Then you can go back and pound that local yokel into Center’s dust."

"Will it take that long? To repair Shenlong?"

"Yes, I think it will. It is badly damaged, and it takes time for me to mesh my magic to technology. Shenlong is one of the best mechas there is. I don't want to ruin it by being too hasty." Jusan sat back, knowing the import of that argument.

Wufei grunted and his shoulders slumped a bit.

"I suggest you rest now, my friend." Jusan's voice dropped, became gentle. "I think you are wearier than you know. One of my servants will show you to your quarters. We can examine Shenlong tomorrow."

Wufei nodded sharply and turned.

"It is nice to see you again, Wufei..." The voice was even softer and was perhaps drowned by the echoes of the closing door. The Scourge smiled slightly at the metal. The smile remained for a few seconds as the body of the tall, sandy-haired man slowly faded from sight, and the air rippled with power as Jusan returned to his shape of an immaterial well-head of energy, dreaming eternal dreams of creation and destruction.  
\---

Trowa had positioned his chair so that he sat between Heero and Duo on one side, and the tall, thin agitated figure in front of the fire-place. But he needn’t have bothered. Heero, the furthest away, practically stuck in a corner, had never seemed that interested in the Zero system to begin with and now looked thoroughly bored. Duo was sitting right next to Trowa, awkwardly fingering the delicate china cup of tea Fen had thrust into his hands, looking wide-eyed and doubtful at the restlessly pacing figure.

Fen spun around once more and his muttering got momentarily louder: " ...don't care that it's the Scourge-... one of the aspects...but he won't destroy his own origin... anathema..."

Trowa sighed silently. Fen was apparently even more senile - or at least distracted - than Svale had suggested.

After entering the keep they had trailed through the echoing empty corridors, looking for the place's last inhabitant. The fort was immense, but most rooms were empty, full of dust, debris and cobwebs, some were even caved in. They found Fen by following the well-worn trail of footsteps in the dust of the hallway. The tracks led them deep into a large room near the base of the cliff, far from any trace of the outside world. A fire burned in defiance of the daylight and warmth outside, and it was needed; the room was possessed of a chill and darkness that knew nothing of sunshine and summer. Two tall candle holders struggled to bring a bit of steadier light than the crackling fire. The room was the only one they'd seen that was furnished. Books upon books were stacked through the room and piled messily into crude wooden shelves. Charts and faded tapestries hung on the walls, their meaning erased by time and darkness. A long high table occupied one of the sides of the room, strewn with equipment tailored, Trowa's arcane knowledge informed him, for magical research of the highest order. There were also a few wrenches, screw-drivers, a computer and a set of nano controllers, techno tools that looked oddly out of place among the rest. The center of the room contained six mismatched chairs and stools, and a small, sturdy wooden table that had the remains of several meals on it. Hard rations, Trowa noted without surprise. He doubted Fen got out much. Shopping was probably a yearly event.

Fen had greeted them without surprise as if they were regular visitors, served them lukewarm herbal tea without further question, shoved a plate of slightly moldy biscuits at them and then, when Trowa had managed to tell him about the Scourge and ask him about Zero, had gone off to mutter to himself aggrievedly for about ten minutes now.

Trowa heard Quatre sigh, then saw the healer quickly look up, embarrassed. Fen hadn't noticed. He was a tall man, and still ramrod straight, but he looked more than old; he was antiquated. His skin was pale and translucent like old ice, carved into lines and wrinkles like a craggy glacier eaten by wind and the passage of seasons. His hair was sparse and white, and fell in a thin veil over his shoulders to tangle and knot in the collar of the old-fashioned and hole-ridden velvet tunic he wore, which might have been red a very long time ago. His eyes were the blue of ice caught in sunlight, but now yellowed and vague with the years. Trowa could not guess his age - he still moved fairly well, though with a creak of muscle and sinew - but 'old' he certainly was.

"So, this Zero thing-" Duo tried to interrupt the mutterings of the man and Trowa glared at him. Duo gave an apologetic half-shrug to the shaman. Well not that apologetic, he was obviously bored and wanted to get on with the object of their visit.

"Do you even know what Zero is, boy!?"

Fen was suddenly a few feet from Duo, a finger like an old bone pointing at him. Duo jumped so badly he sloshed tea onto his black leathers.

"Er-"

"The Zero system is one of the finest arcane creations of the Jishin! Do you think I should be handing out artifacts from the Tricksters like they were party favors?"

Duo rolled his eyes with a 'not this again' look. "Who cares who it belonged to, that's not important, we need it to-"

"Not important?! Not important?! Do you know what the Jishin were, boy?"

"Do I know? No. Do I care? No-"

"The Jishin were the twilight people, the race of Tricksters, the nightmares haunting the night of all the younger races, the walkers of shadows! They were-"

Duo whimpered as Fen turned back to rant at the gargoyle on the side of the fire place. "Why do they always assume I want to hear this shit?" he asked Trowa in a pitiful tone.

"You look like a good listener."

"But I'm not! I'm a good talker, I grant you, but I'm not a -"

"Shh."

"The Jishin were old beyond what most races can comprehend." Fen was now staring at Quatre's left ear. The young man squirmed a bit under the intensity of the glance, but he did look interested. "They were as powerful as their own gods, whom they tolerated only to fight them and curse them. Their arcane knowledge increased exponentially with every generation. Do you know why, boy?" He was now speaking directly to Quatre’s right shoulder.

"N-no, why?" Quatre asked gamely and took a hasty sip of tea, looking, Trowa thought, achingly young and nice and polite.

"Because of the Soul-Mind they shared, the Tamashii Korro, the Halls of the Dead. Every Jishin that died rejoined the Tamashii of the Jishin, and every new Jishin that reached puberty could access that repository of memories and awareness like a giant library. It was keyed into bloodlines, the knowledge of the previous generation was passed directly to their descendants, but more generally the entirety of all their knowledge was available in the Halls. Nothing was ever lost, but preciously passed on."

"Wow." Quatre's intelligent eyes widened. "So they never had to learn what the deceased generation already knew? They inherited the knowledge wholly? That is a powerful ability. That's amazing in fact. I never knew this."

Fen's watery blue eyes suddenly focused on Quatre, and he stared into the bright face as if seeing it for the first time. The craggy planes creased into something like a smile.

"Yes, not many people do, young...what's your name?"

"Quatre Raberba Winner." Quatre nodded politely. They had already introduced themselves, but he repeated the courtesy anyway.

"Better known as Rabbit, hey, Tro?" Duo snickered softly besides the shaman who ignored him; they'd quickly established that Fen was somewhat deaf.

"Well, Quatre Raberba Winner-"

"Just Quatre, please!" Quatre smiled like the sunshine that never penetrated the dusty old room of the inner dungeon that was Fen's lair (Trowa felt his heart quiver, and wondered if it would still do so fifty years from now when they were both older and wiser, and guessed it probably would).

Fen smiled back. "Very well, Quatre. And you must call me Fen." Duo groaned faintly in the background. "That's not my real name, of course. I lost that, oh, ages ago. I had several, in fact, since I..." old eyes looked suddenly very vague " ...I... changed, I... I don't remember. But Fen will do. Where was I?"

"You said the Jishin inherited the memory of the generation that preceded them." Quatre said, ignoring Duo's _don't encourage him!_ gesture.

"Ahh yes. The Jishin...powerful race..."

"How come hardly anyone's ever heard of them then," Duo muttered, clonking his teacup on the ground, infusion untasted.

"What was that?" Fen tried to focus on the man sitting near Trowa. "Never heard of them? Well, that's not surprising. The Jishin were not conquerors. They weren't invaders and pillagers and destroyers that marked the pages of history with blood and fire. They didn't much care for enslaving other races. But they had a foothold on every known planet of the galaxy, even though very few people knew this. The Jishin were, above all else, curious. They were seekers of knowledge. They created enclaves, Sanctuaries, on every inhabited planet their arcana could reach, and magical gates to and from Iwa No Hone, their home world. Inside the Sanctuaries they studied the races around them, most times in secret, learned what they wanted of their magic and their ways, and added this data to the pool of knowledge of the Halls of the Jishin."

"Really?" Quatre looked puzzled. "They don't sound bad at all, then. I mean, if they didn't conquer anybody - and it sounds like they could if they wanted to-"

"Indubitably," Fen snorted.

"- and all they did was study people...why did you say they were nightmares?"

"Because the curiosity of the Jishin did not take into account things like mercy, or kindness, or basic humanity," Fen elaborated, like an elderly professor addressing a well-meaning but misinformed pupil. As the old man turned back to the fireplace, Quatre gave Trowa an amused glance, but his eyes as they returned to Fen were kind and attentive. Trowa felt the quiver again, and smiled. Besides him Duo slumped into his chair with a small growl.

"The Jishin were cruel, not for cruelty's sake but just because they never bothered with limitations, their own or others. Several powerful magical races have been created uniquely by the interference of Jishin upon normal human beings, out of pure curiosity. Several dead races too, if you see what I mean. And a lot of weird and wonderful monsters. Iwa No Hone is a hotbed of creatures that should exist only in nightmares. The Jishin didn't care; they let them roam free, on the assumption that a Jishin who could get killed by something their race had created probably didn't deserve to live anyway."

"Oh." Quatre looked slightly horrified. Trowa wanted to go over and slip a hand in his, he knew how Quatre felt about such disregard for life. But Duo was shifting and muttering about 'boring old coot' under his breath, and the shaman thought it best to stay where he was and glare the younger man into submission, or at least silence. Behind them, Heero's eyes had gone glassy and he was apparently in the suspended state he liked to adopt on occasions when he sat on rocks and stared at nothing. Maybe it was some form of meditation...

"You have actually heard of the Jishin, Quatre, though you probably don't know it," Fen continued without noting the healer's reaction. "The stories of their race permeates our subconscious, inhabits our folklore. The Tricksters, who swap babies for monsters in the night. The Elsire who walk the shadows. Who dance under the stars, appearing as colored lights to travelers -"

"Oh I know that legend!" Quatre said enthusiastically. "Someone stops at a mound at night, even though he's told not to, because he sees colored lights like fairy lanterns swinging about. When he goes into the mound he's transported to the world of the Elsire, and then he marries a princess, or falls asleep for a hundred years-"

"Or ends up strapped to a gurney and dissected by curious Jishin, more likely," the old man snorted.. "Falling asleep for a few years might be an option. Or returned to his home with the head of an ass instead of his own. He wouldn't marry a princess; the Jishin didn't have much truck with other races. But the colored lights are correct. That would be their spirit armor."

"The glass armor of the Elsire!" Quatre gasped in sudden excited comprehension as myths and Fen's explanations merged in his mind.

"That's what legend called it, though glass would be ridiculously fragile. It was in actuality a physical manifestation of a Jishin’s spirit and life-force. Though it looked like glass, it was harder than steel. It was semi-transparent and lit from the inside by their spirit - blue, green, gold, red, silver, the colors of their Houses and their arcane affinity. It protected them from harm both physical and magical. And it was beautiful and striking, which is why it stays in legends. As did many facts about the Jishin; their capricious nature - capricious may be a better term than cruel, they were rarely malicious by intent. Their beauty has also passed into myth. And the Last Journey."

"Is that real too?" Quatre stared. "I heard that legend as well; how the Elsire of the Twilight all left the fairy mounds -" in the back of the room Duo muttered something nasty about 'fucking fairy nonsense' "-and traveled back to the land of evergreen to live out their dying days in peace."

"Not in peace." Fen sighed. "Their race was getting old and tired, I guess. They were so ridiculously powerful, maybe they ran out of challenges...They retreated, abandoning their Sanctuaries one by one, to return to Iwa No Hone, their home planet, their mother. A cruel, harsh place, but fascinating and wild as they were. They worshiped their planet more than their gods, they were close to the earth, to stones and rock and green growing things. But they weren't destined to end out their days in peace. Because of the Scourge." Fen's voice dropped and darkened and he suddenly spun to spit in the fire.

"That thrice-bedamned force of nature...even he didn't dare attack the Jishin openly. It cost him, but he got them through treachery. Tricked the Tricksters. Wiped them out. I hate him...but-" Fen seemed to pull himself in from a long way away. "But I can't let you have the Zero system. It took me years - I'm talking decades here - to control it. Not master it! Merely get to the state where I can link to it without going stark raving mad." 

Trowa's eyebrows shot up in alarm. The idea of a stark raving mad Heero was even less appealing than Jusan. 

"I had to use an old mecha I found knocking about...I think it was mine at one time...I can't remember." Again that vague look in old eyes. "It's very good, now, I've boosted it with magic and my knowledge of technology in my spare time. Zero helped me see where to best apply my knowledge, and Epyon helped me to control Zero; it formed a bit of a cycle. But I have years and years of studying to do before I can master it. The idea of hooking it into a modern Dragon mecha and giving it to an untrained whelp -" his eyes wandered off in Heero's direction, but the latter was oblivious - "is ludicrous, and the attempt will do more harm than good. Trust me."

Damn. Trowa sighed and stood. Quatre gave him a relieved smile and stood as well.

"Well, thank you for the time, Fen, and for the tea," Trowa said politely.

"And thanks for telling us about the Jishin, that was fascinating." Quatre smiled. Fen returned it, eyes focusing on the healer.

"It was a pleasure, young man. I guess I don't get many visitors nowadays...I'm not sure...I can't remember...Won't you stay for tea?"

"Oh gods," Duo said. 

Trowa glared at him, then turned towards Fen. "No thank you, we have to get going. We have a long road ahead of-"

"Is that the Zero system?"

The question came from a totally unexpected quarter for Trowa, who'd been keeping an eye on Heero and Duo. But it was Quatre who had asked the question as he pointed at a shelf near the fireplace. There was an object like a harp that had suffered a dimensional accident, silicate material and wires strutting out in all directions. Trowa had thought it was statuary, or possibly something broken, but from Fen's startled look, Quatre had guessed right. The young healer looked incurious about it, though, he was staring blankly at the shelf as if there were more interesting.

"Why yes. Actually it's the container. Zero is an arcane pattern, a spell if you will. I've imprinted it on my mecha as well."

"Oh." Quatre frowned slightly at the shelf, he looked like he was trying to listen to something that was at the cusp of his hearing. Then his face smoothed.

"Thanks for everything, Fen," he said, and smiled and nodded. Fen stepped towards him, put a friendly hand on the slender shoulder and nodded back, ready to walk him to the door.

"That's quite all right, young one." Fen looked down at the bright face, the wide, innocent eyes. "I was glad to-"

Quatre lifted a hand and let loose a powerful mage-bolt at point blank range straight into Fen's chest.

 

\---

Next Chapter: Epyon

Someone trying to feed me moldy biscuits and herbal tea would also get shot, so fair enough.


	18. Epyon

For a split second all was frozen. The old man, limbs spread-eagled, seemed pinned in mid-air, everyone else as still as statues.

Then Fen reeled back, choking, and Quatre, face indifferent, fired another blast that nearly knocked the old man into the fireplace.

Trowa was already moving as alien lines coalesced around them all, taking him utterly by surprise. Whatever had happened hadn't been in the lines of fate or intent, which didn't seem possible. Why had Quatre-...Trowa threw himself between his lover and the figure stirring near the fireplace, to stop Quatre from firing again and to stop Fen from retaliating.

But Quatre brushed past him as if he wasn't there and ran to the shelf near the fire, ignoring the old man nearby.

"Quatre!" Trowa lunged after him and crashed into Duo. 

Duo tried to shake himself free of Trowa's instinctive hold. "Tro! The old man! Watch it!" He squirmed away and threw himself towards Fen, placing himself between the old man and Quatre. Firelight glinted off the blade of a dagger in his hand.

Trowa only glanced at the figure slowly rising near the fire. It was _impossible_ , Quatre had fired twice point-blank, Fen had no shields and should be dead- 

Quatre had picked up Zero and was staring at it blankly, as if unsure what to do with it now that he had it. Trowa practically carried him out of the way, hustled him behind Heero who had also stepped forward, menacing eyes on Fen. Feeling familiar arms around him, Quatre smiled gently up at Trowa.

And crushed the fragile contraption in his hands.

Trowa shouted in alarm as unfamiliar and frightening lines suddenly leaped from the broken thing and crackled alongside his lover's.

Quatre looked puzzled, then his eyes slowly unfocused and he sank to the ground.

"Tro? We could use a hand over here."

Trowa gritted his teeth. Two patterns met his horrified senses as he stared at Quatre. The alien geometries that were Zero were lying quiescent, like a complex choreography with no dancer to attend it. The lines that were Quatre, his soul, his chakra, his mind...Trowa felt panic touch him as he saw those lines muddle and fade into stunned confusion and stillness. Something- there was something else here, something that was holding Quatre down, gently but firmly.

On the edge of Trowa's awareness, lines of intent speared towards the young healer; Quatre was in danger.

" _You dare!_ "

Grave danger.

"T-Tro?!" Duo whimpered, stepping back and wisely placing himself behind Heero.

The old man had been wearing Epyon under the tattered velvet tunic, which was why he had survived the blasts. Epyon had activated and Fen was now fully armored. This mecha was not like Wing and Shenlong; metal encased the man entirely in large thick scales the color of old blood. A strange helmet had sprouted around Fen's head, covering his face entirely; glass eye-holes glinted green, and something like a metal duster covered nose and mouth, giving him a frighteningly mechanistic appearance. The room was full of the sound of metal latching on to metal as the armor consolidated. Something rattled. In Fen's hand a thick chain flail flicked and cracked in anger.

Heero stepped forward, and Wing obeyed his mental command. Fortunately Howard had activated it once more before they'd left the Sanctuary, despite Svale's misgivings. Armor slithered sensuously over Heero's body, and dark blue eyes gleamed in anticipation.

Fen snorted, his features hidden by a metal scowl but his disdain clear.

"I see you have hidden talents, boy. In another few hundred years you might be able to challenge me. But not today."

Heero smirked and Wing flew over his hands to form his armored gloves. He didn't look like he was about to bother with the sword again.

"It's a pity..." For an instant Fen's voice dropped into scholarly tones again. "I would have liked to see what you could have done with Zero. Too old...but-... yes, I know. Very well. Of _course_ , but if he can't move, he can't hurt us, right?"

"What the-" Duo stared over Heero's shoulder at the old lunatic apparently talking to himself.

Fen leaped forward, as light as a young boy, as deadly as a bullet. Heero was ready and fended off the blow from the flail that rang, metal against metal, on Wing's wrist guard, then twisted into the low kick that followed. His fists darted, impacting Epyon twice, a quick, testing jab. Fen swerved and seemed to fall back, turning...

The armored figure swung around and hurled the flail. It whipped around like a bola, picked Heero up and slammed him against the wall.

"Shit!" Duo shouted. Heero was silent, glaring at Fen, flexing his arms against the metal.

His eyes widened suddenly, and Trowa could see his muscles arch and strain... and the flail’s chain slithered and clinked against Wing as it tightened by itself and plunged viciously into the thick stone like a tree root growing through concrete, pinning Heero to the wall.

"Oh fuck," Duo muttered as Fen turned away from the restrained warrior and focused on him. Another flail was growing like a shoot of brambles from Epyon's glove and was lashing back and forth. "Trowa?"

Fen roared, the tones warped by the helmet covering his antiquated features. The sound was still echoing when he attacked Duo.

Trowa scooped up Quatre and placed him behind a stone buttress, as safe as circumstances could provide. In his mind’s eye, he saw the flail fly. He felt only a dull surprise at Duo's speed as he dodged and evaded it. The mystery that was Duo Maxwell was really not at the top of his list of priorities at present. He unslung his crossbow and wrenched the mechanism, watched the dance of vectors carefully as he slipped two bolt into the cradle. 

The arching lines of fate and death reeled the shot in towards Fen, and Trowa loosed the bolt.

Once more, the impossible occurred. It was becoming quite banal in fact. Trowa had worked hard on three special runic bolts after his meeting with the Dragon, he wanted something that could pierce Dragon Scale if necessary. The lines said that his shot would impact Fen above the heart, severing the artery. And then impossibly, while the bolt was in mid-flight, the lines wrenched and realigned themselves, and the bolt splintered against the armored palm of Fen's hand that had flown up to intercept. Trowa felt a slight relief when he noticed that the bolt _had_ penetrated the armor. At least that much was working. Fen roared and grabbed his palm and wrenched the bloodied tip of the dart from it. The green glowing eyes centered on Trowa.

"You...you dare attack me?! Do you know who I-..." The man interrupted himself and his tone sounded suddenly vague. "Who...who I am...?"

Then the flail lashed out again at Duo who managed to throw himself back over the table half a second before it splintered. Broken plates and a mug clattered to the floor, rolling after him. The candelabra were knocked over in a splatter of wax and broken candles. Shadows invaded the room, daubed in red and gold war paints by the flickering firelight.

The flail lifted and the handle’s end seemed to stare straight at Trowa. He could see the lines of Fen's intent dart towards him- and then warp and weave and _move_ in ways that just didn’t make sense!

The Zero system!

Howard had talked about it as a technologist, all mathematics and probability and computations, but this was an arcana, and Trowa suddenly realized what it could do. It allowed a normal man to see the lines of fate and intent around him. Even...even manipulate them to some extent. The shaman felt his gorge rise in horror at the blasphemous thing warping the very lines of destiny around the armored figure. He didn't think men should have access to such power, it went against the natural order of things.

Fen and Trowa stared at each other, immobile. All was quiet around them apart from the scrabble and scraping of Heero trying to break free from the shackle binding him to the wall. Duo fell back besides Trowa, knife flipped to a throwing hold, but he didn't look very hopeful. Trowa risked a quick glance over his shoulder. Quatre was still safe, protected by the buttress. His blue eyes were open, he was looking at them with a lost, puzzled gaze, but he was still tightly bound by-... whatever it was, and he couldn't speak or move. He seemed only partly aware of his surroundings. Trowa tore his full attention back to the battle of initiative playing out between himself and Fen. If the old man was responsible for Quatre's state, hopefully his death would release the healer. Trowa had not had the intention of killing when he sat down for tea this afternoon, but he didn't think the man would leave him a choice.

Fen was no warrior, Trowa realized. He was using the Zero system to read the lines and see where best to strike and how to defend. But Trowa could read them too, he could also see where the blow would be coming from. This was probably causing a shifting of the lines in Zero's analysis, as it tried to compensate and catch the shaman off guard, and this was confusing Fen. A warrior would have used the massive power of Epyon to break the deadlock in an attack, but Fen wasn't sure how to proceed without Zero’s guidance.

On the downside, Epyon/Zero could manipulate the lines where Trowa could only read and follow them. The flail hissed and shook slightly. Epyon was thirsty for blood. Trowa's, Duo's...and then Quatre's. Trowa's grip tightened on the crossbow stock as he forced his gift of Sight to work faster. A half-formed prayer to Center died in his heart. The earth didn't care at the passing of one of its creatures. The wheel turned. He had a bad feeling it was about to turn for himself and Quatre...Whatever small mercy Center had would see to it that they would probably die together.

\---

Behind Trowa, Quatre's eyes slowly focused. The dazed look cleared a little and he stared, frowning, at the shaman's back. Blue eyes widened slowly in alarm as Quatre tentatively felt words and notions whisper in his mind, telling where this scenario was leading, the danger to himself...and Trowa. On his forehead, very briefly, something flickered, like a small symbol. Besides Trowa, Duo suddenly twitched and looked back -

\---

How fast was this Zero? Trowa's mind raced, still fighting, still trying to find a way out of the tangle of lines knotting around them. Could he outmaneuver it, even if he could only follow the lines of fate instead of warp them? Could he-...

He heard Duo hiss in alarm and take a step towards Quatre.

Suddenly lines twitched and vibrated around Trowa, like the strands of a web as the spider approached. Fen took two steps back, trying to evaluate the changing situation.

Trowa tasted blood. He'd bit his lip savagely and barely noticed. His whole body shuddered at the sudden wrench in the lines of fate, like a man trying to stay standing while the earth is being rocked by a quake. He didn't have to glance behind him to know where the change was coming from, who was warping the lines around him, giving him the chance to strike at Fen without Epyon/Zero reading his intent. The warp and weave of lines had a familiar pattern imprinted on them. Quatre.

He allowed himself one glance back. Quatre was on the floor, leaning in the shadows of the buttress, eyes blank, his chakra lines screaming and warping to the rhythm of the alien spell that was possessing him. They- they were melding! Quatre was trying to shield his lover from Epyon by using Zero. 

Trowa's mind screamed in panic as lines joined and blended, Quatre's and Zero's. No no no no- but he couldn't do anything, couldn't leave his position between Fen and the healer, or the old man would strike at the one trying to counter his manipulation of probabilities. Where - where was Duo?! Damn and blast the braided fool, he'd disappeared! Now was not the time-

Vectors writhed and suddenly arched towards Trowa's target. The bow shot up instinctively as lines coalesced. Trowa tried to ignore the unnatural vectors born of the Zero manipulation, concentrating on the purer lines of the earth. Center, guide me, he thought, more an entreaty than a prayer.

The bolt left the bow with a sharp rustle of sliced air, and Fen roared as he tried to dodge it, Epyon/Zero deciphering the danger despite Quatre's amateur interference. The old man leaned back. The bolt struck the metal pauldron and glanced off with a screech of scored metal. Trowa was loading his last improved bolt before the previous one even struck. He didn't have much hope though. Fen staggered back two feet, off balance from the evasion, then straightened, rallying.

The shadows behind the old man flowed together and combined - Duo was behind their attacker. In his hand, a dagger reflected the firelight as it cut through the darkness. It struck at the join between two plaques of armor, plunging into Epyon's dark metal near Fen's spine.

Fen screamed and spun. The dagger whipped up on the same graceful arc to plunge between the armor and the helmet and stab him in the throat.

The armored figure staggered back, hand reaching to his neck, a strange gurgle erupting from within the helmet. Interrupted by the solid meaty thud of Trowa's last runic bolt plunging through the armor plate at another joint and burying itself in his lung.

Duo stepped from the shadows warily. Trowa could only wonder numbly how his comrade had gotten there so fast. They watched the old man totter and slowly crumple to the ground. The slim dagger in Duo’s hand was glowing in the firelight through streaks of blood, apparently intact even after cutting through Dragon scale. Trowa had thought it was a normal knife...The thought trickled from his mind as he felt Quatre’s lines and Zero's output flicker out behind him, leaving only emptiness.

"Duo, take care of Heero," he said distantly as he turned back towards the slumped figure of his lover. Quatre's eyes were now closed. All lines were turned inward and warped beyond belief. Only the slightest flicker of his chakra showed him to be there at all.

Trowa sank next to him, put a hand on the blond bangs. He closed his eyes and, regardless of where he was or who he was with or whatever preparations would have made his trance easier, Walked the well-known body and soul before him. All the lines tangled and plunged deep into Quatre's being. He couldn't begin to unravel the knot.

"Is Quatre okay?" Duo had followed him. Trowa glanced back at Heero struggling against the chain still holding him against the wall. Duo followed his glance and shrugged. "He's not going anywhere. I'll get to him in a sec. Assuming I can do anything. What's with blondie? What did Fen do to him?"

Quatre's body slumped into Trowa's arms as the shaman gathered him gently to him. "I don't know. I didn't see Fen do anything...I wasn't watching them." He'd been watching Duo and Heero.

"All I saw was the old coot put a hand on Quatre's shoulder. Maybe Fen tried a spell? Oh well, now the old bastard's dead, Q'll be fine. Right?"

"He's not going to be fine," Trowa said numbly. "He's infected with the Zero spell. And something else, something I can't define." Duo's eyes widened in slight surprise and alarm, for an instant it seemed to be concentrated on Trowa rather than Quatre-...Trowa looked hard into violet-blue eyes and was met by the guileless stare of a man who had been Quatre's friend for a few months now and was obviously worried about him. The shaman sighed, this was not the time to get paranoid.

"What something else? Something Fen did?" Duo prompted.

"...It could very well be. It would explain why Quatre attacked him. I don't know why Fen would-...but Svale told us he was eccentric."

"She meant senile, not dangerous." Duo cast a glance back at the still form in the growing pool of blood, and muttered to himself: "Not _that_ dangerous anyway. I almost-" then he glanced at Trowa. "Well, we got him. Now we need to get 'Rabbit' back to Svale. She'll be able to sort him out, right?"

"And why is that?" Trowa found himself asking. He felt numb. He knew he had to move, to react, but the numbness kept the frightening truth at bay.

"’Cause this Zero thing is Jishin, and she specializes in that, right? Come on, Tro, snap out of it. Let's get him back to the Sanctuary. He'll be fine."

Trowa glanced up at Duo's hand on his shoulder, then into the eyes which seemed suddenly deeper and older. "He will be fine, Trowa. We just need to get him back to the Sanctuary," Duo whispered. "Come on."

A ripping crash tore the air and they both twisted around in time to see Heero finish destroying the wall behind him to give him the leverage to yank off Epyon's flail. Trowa had never heard the man swear, but by the glare in Heero's eyes as he threw the chain onto the corpse in the center of the room, he was apparently contemplating it.

"Well, that's one less thing for me to do!" Duo said brightly. "Come on, let's get out of this mausoleum."

Trowa's eyes fell blindly on Fen's body.

"Don't worry about the fossil. If Svale cuts up rough about it, she can bloody well come bury the murderous bastard herself. Hell, I'll even buy her a shovel. Come on. Heero? Stop glaring at the bugger, he's dead now."

Heero glanced up at Duo in something like surprise. His eyes went from Fen's corpse to Duo a few times as if he was about to say something. Then he shrugged and turned away, striding out of the room, Wing slowly folding back into its resting position.

Trowa and Duo exchanged puzzled glances and followed.

 

\---

 

Silence and the disturbed dust of decades danced in the firelight and fell on the still figure at its center. Blood pooled, found the cracks in the flagstones, trickled down into rivers and deltas, nudging old grime aside and sweeping it along like miniature flash floods.

The fire crackled unattended, and a log broke and fell.

Epyon stirred.

It had tried to repair the damage done to its bearer, but it was beyond the mecha's power. All its sensors - which were attuned to more banal life forms - informed it that its owner was dead. It slowly retracted into itself, leaving the corpse to the dust, the firelight and the silence.

Something small stirred from its corner near the fireplace where it had been watching the blood with frustrated desire. But its master had given it a stern warning about feeding off the old creature.

"Finally," it muttered as it saw Epyon retreat. It picked up a stone, a little round gray pebble, and cupped it in its tiny hands.

"Master? Hope this thing works. Master Duo?"  
The stone seemed to glow a bit brighter in the golden firelight and the creature settled.

"Yes, Master. The-...metal thing has disappeared. What do I do with the body?...Very well."

It settled once more, giving the blood one last yearning glance. Then it curled up to sleep until nightfall.

\---

The fire had almost died when footsteps rang once more in the dusty corridors. Duo slipped through the door, flicked a small stone at Imp - it bounced off its head and brought the small creature awake with a start - and approached the body.

"Master?" Imp flew up to hover over Duo's shoulder.

"Yes, finally. I can't stay too long. Apparently Trowa's not going to sleep tonight, he's going to Walk around Quatre now that the moon is up. And Heero never sleeps. I had to pretend to go scout out tomorrow's road to get away and teleport back."

Imp bobbed up and down in alarm. "Won't the shaman find your Mark on the healer?"

" _My_ Mark? Don't kid me, Imp. Maadaku dai Juusan couldn't find my Mark. Trowa doesn't stand a chance." Duo knelt by Fen and studied the long form carefully. "Right, on to the next part of today's fun and games. This old geezer was quite the effort to put down. I had to pull a fast one to plug him. Fortunately the others were too distracted to notice. Quite the scrapper, weren't you." Duo's fingers brushed the long thin hair away from the lax features.

"Too bad he's so old, Master. And dead," Imp added curiously. His master had hinted that the latter condition was not permanent.

"Then let's see what he's like in the flower of youth, shall we? Grab me an ember from the fire, Imp."

Puzzled, the piece of sentient rock obeyed. Under Duo's directions it tossed the ember onto the remains of the velvet tunic which started to smoke a little.

"What now, Master?"

"Well...I don't know. Normally combustion occurs when the body starts to decompose, but I can't wait that long. And then it burns for seven years and I _really_ can't wait that long. I was hoping to speed things up a bit, but to tell you the truth I'm making this up as I go along, I know very little about this creature."

The tunic smoldered. The ember darkened, turned black. Imp tossed another ember into the lank, silvery hair fanning around Fen's head. It caught, a tiny flame dancing, then it guttered out as it reached the pool of blood from the cut throat.

"Maybe I can put some wood around-" Imp started.

"Screw this," Duo said, lifted his hands and let rip.

Imp flew back under the blast and thunked into a wall. Pieces of wood from the broken table scattered and started to smolder. Smoke flared out, running before the pulses of power, choking acrid black and smelling of scorched flesh.

Imp hopped nearer carefully once the blasts died down. Duo and his familiar looked down at the corpse. It was blackened under the intense heat Duo had generated, the clothes burned away, limbs contorted as skin had charred and pulled.

Duo prodded it with a foot.

Nothing happened.

"Master...are you sure...?" Imp fluttered up and cautiously latched itself to Duo's shoulder. Duo scratched his nose, puzzled.

"Hmph. Hang on, imp."

"Wh- Master, no!"

Imp managed to grab the leather jerkin with a grip of stone as the room turned into an inferno, blossoming from Duo’s outstretched hands.

Books, wood, the old tapestries, everything combusted. The remaining logs in the fireplace exploded shortly before the gridiron melted and ran over the flagstones, pinging and cracking under the heat. A bookcase shivered into embers and ash within a few seconds and fell forward, bursting into cinders and a crackle of flame as it hit the floor.

Imp shrieked over the roar of fire. " _Duo! No! Juusan will-_ "

Duo, at the center of the fury, smiled like death and increased the temperature. The door exploded outward in flaming pieces of wood, the hinges fell to the ground with a thud and started to melt. The ceiling groaned alarmingly as rock expanded from the heat. The stone under the body blackened and then sparked with little flakes of red as the impurities in the granite combusted.

Suddenly Duo staggered, buffeted forward by a strong wind that seemed to spring out of nowhere. It ripped through the room, lashing the flames, drawing them in towards the body like a vacuum. The remains burst into a blue-white flame that danced along its entire length. Sparks like lightning flickered across the flagstones.

Then a sound ripped through the room and out into the mountain air. More than a sound, it was loud enough to be a physical force, hurling Duo back and snuffing the flames like a candle. The shriek echoed through the entire mountain range, echoing from peak to peak, tumbling down into hidden valleys and losing itself in the forests beyond.

Duo lay still for a second. Despite his raised shields and a certain amount of anticipation, his head was ringing like an alarm bell.

"...Didn't think it was gonna be that loud," he said weakly, his words muffled in his ears.

There was a gentle gargle from besides his right shoulder. Imp tried to scrape itself off the floor.

"Wha-... wha-..."

"They don't call it the Birdscry mountains for nothing."

"B-Bird's Cry? The-...the mountains are named for this thing?"

"Yeah," Duo said vaguely, experimentally sticking his fingers in and out of his ears to see if that made a difference to the way his voice echoed in his head. "He's been here quite a while, and died several times. Let's go see what we got."

Imp managed to latch onto the leather again. Its master staggered over to the body, rubbing his ears.

Fen's corpse was covered in a thick char of ash. The shape was bigger than before, almost as if the flames had coalesced and frozen around it. Duo nudged it with his foot. A bit fell off.

Duo frowned and flicked a finger. A whisper of force shook the mass, crumpled the charred shell. White flesh started to gleam where some pieces had fallen off.

A further flick of force and the shell cracked and broke into two, exposing the body inside, gleaming white and gold, untouched by soot.

Duo's eyebrows shot up and his jaw dropped. "Stone me!" he finally said. "He's quite the looker!"

Imp carefully looked over the man lying in the broken mold of ash. It couldn't really judge. The creature was tall, that was apparent even as he lay on the ground, long limbs stretched out. He had regular features, and the hair was now a glorious mane of gold, nearly white in the darkness barely lit by dying embers. The skin shone in the shadows.

"Is that what you expected, Master?"

"Yeah. Well no, I'd never have guessed ol' 'Fen' would look this good. But then again, I don't know much about the Phoenix. And you can't rely on legends. They say it drinks blood and will kill you with a scream, and instead I find it enjoys lukewarm herbal infusions and can only paralyze you with boredom. At least they got the burning thing right. Ah, and this as well."

Duo leaned forward and fingered a stone on a golden chain that hung around the elegant neck, the only clothing or decoration on the ash-born form besides the metal pieces of Epyon, apparently undamaged. "The birdstone. That's nice, now I don't have to search the entire keep to find it. With this, golden boy here is going to have to join the gang. I just don't know how I'm going to explain this to the others. It's going to be hard enough to get the whole Quatre thing sorted. Especially now he has Zero, and has actually _used_ it. That wasn't expected. Oh well, I'll think of something!" Duo gave his manic grin and ripped the slender chain from Fen. The man - now apparently in his twenties - jerked and thrashed briefly, marring his pale skin with soot.

"Master?" Imp said, worried, ducking behind Duo.

"Don't worry, after that much power he's going to be out for awhile. Imp, take this-" Imp blinked as the stone landed in its hands "-back to the hideout and put it somewhere safe. I need to get back. That god-awful noise will have alarmed the others. I better-"

"I hope nobody else is alarmed, Master," Imp said carefully.

"Whaddya mean, pebble?"

"You...used an awful amount of force."

Duo blinked. He couldn't always judge the quantity of power he was using, which was why he avoided magic as much as possible, particularly now, with the enemy finally closing in. Duo tilted his head back, looking beyond the scorched and blackened ceiling, out towards the night sky and the menacing stars. He frowned.

"That wouldn't be good. We're not ready for him yet. I didn't realize...well, hopefully he won't have noticed. Come on, Imp, I'll port you, we don't want to leave a trace. I want bird-boy here following Quatre, not you. Let's get going." He cast one last glance above and disappeared, leaving the blond man starting to stir and gasp, lying in ash and ruin.

 

\--- 

Wufei went from fast asleep to sitting up in bed waving a Dragon Fang before his eyes had even opened as he felt Juusan’s presence.

//Wufei.//

Black eyes blinked sleep away. "What the fuck are you doing in my room?!"

Juusan's ghostly lips twitched. It was Juusan's ship, so technically this was one of his rooms; Wufei was here for Juusan to fix Shenlong, the Dragon was his guest and really it was only the Power's whim that kept him from being a prisoner or worse. But if any of that occurred to the young man, it wasn't evident in his tone. The universe could end and Chang Wufei's arrogance could be used to build a new one. But Juusan didn't let this distract him as he continued to materialize. He didn't like doing this in front of the boy, was strangely adverse to showing him his true nature, though Wufei knew of it. But he had more important concerns.

He materialized into his usual shape this century, a tall debonair figure standing at the foot of Wufei’s bed. His mind drifted away from Wufei’s splutters to more distant concerns.

"That man on Center. Heero, you said. Describe him."

Wufei's jaw dropped. "Huh? What, you didn't get a good look at him when you ripped my memories from my mind?"

"Those were your impressions, your emotions. I want a more analytical description."

Wufei’s mouth shaped itself around an understandable ‘Why?’, but something in Juusan’s aura, slipping through a bit more than usual, must have discouraged the question. Instead, the young man rubbed his face. “Well...he was about my height, maybe an inch taller. He was fairly slender-" 

He flinched as Juusan’s eyes centered fully on him again, aura rippling through the room and lifting little eddies of dust and shimmers of light. 

"...He was pretty tough though. It wasn't just Wing that made him strong, he was all muscle. He had thick brown hair-"

"Long or short?"

"Er, short. Bangs all over his face though.” Wufei was looking more and more confused. “He had brilliant blue eyes beneath them. Quite a dark blue. I guess one could say he was good-looking. He was wearing some kind of old leather outfit, nothing much. He looked like a peasant and moved like a killer. Why?" Curiosity had finally won out over caution. 

"Did he use magic?" Juusan's eyes searched his.

"No. Just his fists," Wufei muttered, rubbing his bare chest under Shenlong’s heart piece.

Jusan looked out the port again, eyes narrowed. "No magic. Maybe it is not him then. Who else could be down there? This doesn't make sense. That power signature doesn't make-..."

An elaborate clock on the guest room wall cut a few seconds out of the silence with its ticks. A decorative swirl of ribbons and streamers hanging near the port-hole were swaying under a breeze that wasn’t one, as Juusan’s thoughts circled. 

"I hope you slept well, Dragon. I am going to start Shenlong's repairs."

"What, now?" Wufei looked equal parts surprised and suspicious. 

"Yes. I think..." Jusan's eyes slowly left the porthole but didn't rest on the Dragon or anything in the room. "I think I might want you back on Center as quickly as we can get you...that might be wise. Come to my office when you are ready." 

\---

 

Wufei watched the Power leave before getting out of bed and reaching for his clothes. Juusan had left through the door rather than dematerialize...but he’d apparently forgotten to open it first, he’d just stepped through. He did not do things like that usually. Odd. As odd as that little flicker that had crossed the oppressive aura flooding the guest room. A flicker of feeling that Wufei couldn’t quite place but that he filed away for later reference. 

Interesting. 

 

Next Chapter: Shi No Kami 

Too many plates spinning results in a mess of porcelain shards on the floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The name of the armor 'Fen' wears should make it clear who this is, even if he's not named as such for awhile. Someone from the anime who just can't stay dead and who seems to wear a lotta names :)


	19. Shi No Kami

Duo trotted out of the shadows of the road to find Heero's wrist-guard pointing at him menacingly.

"Whoa buddy! Just me!" Duo said quickly, trying to look harmless and thinking back longingly to the days when someone pointing a clothing accessory in his direction wasn't a death-threat. This Dragon Scale nonsense was certainly making life interesting.

Heero grunted and left his hand pointing at him for just a second longer than Duo liked. Behind him, Trowa stared back up the road to Fen's keep. They had traveled three hours from the fort, until they'd reached a widening in the road that was backed by a cliff. The vardo was up close against the rocky face, and a fire crackled nearby, its weak light flickering over stone and the wood of the caravan. The strange cry had echoed all the way to their campsite, making the defensible location seem not so protected or safe in finality.

"Gods, what was that horrible noise?" Duo asked innocently and was ignored.

Trowa frowned then rubbed his face. He was looking older and worn and Duo felt... ( **watch him - he suspects - no he’s just in pain-** )-...No, Duo couldn't afford that. Not now. He had to concentrate.

"I don't like this," Trowa muttered. "That's the direction of Fen's keep. If it came from there, it must have been _very_ loud...There are just too many weird things going on around here. Heero can you stay here and watch Quatre and Duo? I'm going to go back up the road and see if I can find out what that was. I think...I think we should have looked more closely into Fen and why Quatre attacked him. Um, Heero?"

Heero had crouched next to Quatre. He was staring at the healer. As they watched, he scowled and rubbed a trace of ocher paint from Quatre's forehead. It smudged like dried blood.

"Heero. Stay here with Duo and Quatre-" Trowa started when the other man stood up.

"It won't come off," Heero said suddenly, scowling at Quatre.

Both Duo and Trowa glanced down at the pale young man in the bedroll. "It's only ocher, Heero," Trowa said tiredly. "It'll come off with some - hey?"

Trowa was talking to Heero's back as the warrior walked briskly up the road, back to the keep.

Duo gave Trowa a grin as he hid his eagerness. "Looks like ol' stony face wants to go with you. You guys be careful, okay? Don't worry, I can watch Quatre until you get back." He barely managed to refrain from making a shooing gesture. Go! Go! **Go!**

Trowa's face creased with worry, but he finally ran after Heero and disappeared into the darkness. Duo could follow his reasoning; the shaman's Walk along Quatre's lines had probably shown him nothing but weirdness. Investigating Fen would be a smart move in light of that. Duo knew Trowa could run fast and tirelessly, and could be back at the fort in less than an hour. At that point he would discover that Duo had destroyed the drawbridge. This would be an obstacle for the shaman. It might not slow down Heero though...Duo didn't like the idea of Heero stumbling upon a recovering Phoenix, but he also desperately needed to deal with Quatre, so this opportunity of some alone time with the healer was too good to resist.

Quatre looked hopelessly young and small, lying on the makeshift bed near the fire, a thin cover drawn up to his waist. Trowa had attempted to Walk his lines under moonlight when his powers were at their peak. The shaman had painted ocher lines and primitive symbols over Quatre's bare chest, his forehead, the palms of his hands and on a circle on the ground around him. Duo couldn't interpret the shamanistic figures or read lines very well, but he was willing to bet Trowa had seen nothing but a messy superposition of the barest of Quatre's vital signals and the morass of Zero's interference.

Duo crouched on the edge of the bedroll, wishing he were better at all this mental stuff. Knowledge was one thing. Ability was another. He’d been more attuned to the earth element in his formative years...He touched Quatre on the forehead with a tentative finger, closed his eyes, slipped between two planes of thought and plunged beneath the surface. Then he recoiled at the tangle of the spell and the healer's mind. He groaned and retreated, reaching out as an after-thought to double-check his Mark was still in place.

"Man, what a mess, Q," he muttered. "Why'd you go and do that for?"

_What, use what you imposed on me to save my lover's life?_

Duo started back so badly he tangled his legs and landed on his butt with a thump. 

"What the fuck!?"

_Surprised, Duo?_

Duo's eyes were wild as he stared at the still form. Quatre was still deeply unconscious, looking young and helpless in the firelight patterning his skin in red and gold. For a fleeting instant Duo thought he'd imagined those words dripping with bitter amusement. But...no, he had not imagined them. Duo had many, many voices in his head, and he knew them all, better than his own. This had not been one of them.

"No way," he ground out, his face taking on a dangerous look as he felt out with his mind once more. "No way you can break my Mark."

_You mean this mental control you have over me? You're unfortunately right. I can't escape it or break it. It can't stop me from thinking though._

"It fucking well should! I put you under after you pulled that dumb stunt with Fen! Damn it - you should be in a coma!"

_So sorry to disappoint you, Duo._

The mental tone of the thoughts was cold, a bit remote, and seemed to be contemplating Duo's words as if they were bugs pinned to a board.

"Disappoint-... This is for your own sake you- **idiot**! The less you interact with Zero, the better-... oh."

_Yes. 'Oh'._

"Oh Quatre, don't. Don't even go there."

_Too late, I'd say._

Duo savagely scrubbed his face with his hand. "Quatre, that thing is not for you. You were only supposed to be the carrier, the _passive_ carrier. You're not supposed to use that shit! It's gonna kill you, man!"

_That is one possible outcome, yes._

"...Stone and bone, why did you go and do that

_You sound sorry._

"Well...yeah...I never meant for-"

_But you would have done it anyway._

"W-what?"

_Even if you'd known it would end like this, you would have done it anyway._

" ...N-no, I would have- **Ei! He suspects - he knows us - but- no, he’s only human - he cannot-** ”

_Huh. Interesting. Do you always spout gibberish when you get angry?_

" **Shut up! Listen! Careful! Zero-** " Duo leapt from his position on the ground, spun and slammed his fist into the bare rock. The fire crackled and flared.

 _Temper temper_. The voice in his head sounded coldly amused.

Duo's snarl slowly eased. His eyes lost the wild look that had possessed them when the Old Words had started ripping through his control. He rose slowly and looked down at Quatre.

"Yes. I wouldn't hesitate to sacrifice you if I needed to. But not in this case," he said shortly. "If Zero kills you, I lose you, I lose Zero, I lose Trowa. I might even lose Heero 'cause I'm damned if I understand how that weirdo is wired together," he added in a mutter.

_Honesty? From you? I'm reeling with shock. Oh no, I'm not, am I. Since you won't allow me any control over my own body._

" ...Is this Zero speaking?"

_Zero is a spell. It can't speak._

"You...just don't sound like your normal self."

_I got screwed over by someone I considered a friend, and I have a good chance of going insane or dying. I'm entitled to a little bit of annoyance._

But it was more than that. There was a coldness, a remove in the healer's mental voice, and a good deal of steely, determined strength. Duo thought it was Zero's influence. He wanted it to be Zero's influence. But deep inside, in the small part of Duo that interacted with and cared about people, a though occurred; that he'd always wondered if there wasn't a bit more to the gentle healer than he, or even Trowa, knew about. Quatre was compassionate and kind, and loving, and disliked confrontation. But Duo had never been able to dismiss him as meek...He'd never looked into it though, Trowa, Svale and Heero were already as much as he could handle. Maybe he should have-...He shook his head abruptly.

"Before you unleash the full force of your sarcasm on me, Quatre, I'll remind you that you weren't supposed to merge with Zero. My Mark should have restricted you and protected you from it. At that point the only way of getting Zero from you and waking you up would have been to imprint it into another carrier, and Wing would have been the only option. It would have forced Svale and Heero to use it on Wing, to remove it from you. Then you'd have been okay." Bar some massive confusion, a hole in his memory and a severe headache.

_Nothing could stop Zero from coming into contact with part of my psyche while it was imprinting itself on me, even your ‘Mark’. And nothing could stop me using it if the alternative was to watch Trowa die protecting me._

"Er, you, you weren't supposed to be, um-"

_Smart enough to use it? You underestimated me. Zero is a challenge, but I managed to grasp enough of it to be able to let its influence get past your restrictions. It allows me to still think despite your shutdown command. It also showed me how to use your '’Mark’ to talk to you._

"Oh man..." From what he knew of Zero, that put Quatre's intelligence and abilities at way above those of most people he knew. He'd never suspected...Damn!

_You took other risks as well. If you had been using Zero yourself, it could have given you an estimate of the probability of your plan blowing up in your face. Did you want to know the odds?_

"Not rea-"

_You made a mistake, Duo._

Duo's eyes narrowed dangerously.

_You made a mistake and you're about to make another._

"What do you-"

A distant clatter alerted him. Duo gave the recumbent form a glare, uncertainty mixed with exasperation, and turned to face the darkness, his dagger flicking into his hand.

Trowa and Heero came into sight, walking quickly, eyes on the night around them.

"That was quick," Duo said weakly, trying to hide his unease. He couldn't help glancing at Quatre again. The mental voice he'd heard was using the Mark to communicate, but Duo's control locked down every other one of the healer's functions. He could feel Quatre's frustration simmer in the nearly quiescent mind; he wouldn't be able to warn Trowa.

"A planet hopper landed not far from here," Trowa said, quickly gathering Quatre in his arms and heading towards the vardo. Duo felt a growl of frustrated anger from the paralyzed man’s mind echo through the Mark. "We saw it from the top of the hill."

"Oh?" Duo frowned. "Are we sure it's related to us?"

"Do you want to stay here and find out?"

"Not particularly. It could be some buddy of Fen's or something." Duo shrugged, glad to avoid one more complication to his day. "How you gonna drive the vardo though? It's too dark to -" Trowa turned towards him, the vision-eye glinting white in the moonlight. "Yeah. Never mind. Let's burn."

Heero was already kicking out the fire. Wing was murmuring and slithering up and down his arms from the wrist-guards, and the head-piece was occasionally sparkling. Trying to feed him information, Duo knew from Howard's work on mechas. Heero had been leery of the headpiece from the start. Duo had hoped that merging zero with Wing would force Heero to use the suit to full capacity. Damn, what a mess...He ran to get the horses, pausing to listen a bit nervously to the sounds of Trowa making Quatre comfortable. If he extended his senses along the Mark, he could feel Quatre's feelings as his mind beat helplessly at the barriers around it, trying to warn Trowa and failing to even get near. Duo winced slightly as the result of Quatre's frustration poured into his mind. He'd never have guessed the gentle healer knew that kind of language.

He wanted another chance to tackle the Zero issue. He had to force Quatre under for good, away from Zero, and start untangling them. He didn't think Quatre would be able to actually _control_ -...no. No surely not. **Of course not** his mind echoed. The healer was hallucinating, he didn't understand Zero at all, couldn't control it. He was talking nonsense. Duo had to separate them. Leave Svale to remove Zero, and hope that it would remove this part of Quatre's memories as well.

"Tro?" Duo led the horses over to the shaman as the later came out of the vardo. "Want me to watch Q while you drive? Might as well, I'll just stub my toes in the dark."

"Yes, I'd appreciate-" Trowa twisted, shoved Duo and threw him to the ground.

Duo gasped and wrenched himself away, preparing for a follow-through. Had Quatre managed to communicate after all?! To his confusion, Trowa's crossbow was unslung and ready in his hands, but he was pointing it away from Duo and at the swell of hills on the other side of the road. And then Duo realized there was a small piece of metal stuck in the wood of the vardo roughly where his chest had been. 

"What the-"

Heero was powering up Wing, and Trowa ghosted back two steps to shelter in the angle of the caravan. The horses, still hobbled fortunately, were nickering and trying to get away from the sudden tension in the air. Duo quickly scrabbled to join Trowa. He glanced at the piece of metal in passing. Taser bolt. Techno. High level. It would have expended its energy into his Ma’daan shield and not given him more than a case of static cling, but that would have led to some _very_ awkward questions from Trowa and Heero afterwards.

"Thanks, Tro," he whispered, with total honestly. "How did you-"

"It's hard to get the drop on a Nightwalker, especially when the moon is shining. They have some kind of magic field dampener or I would have felt them coming a mile away."

"A mana sink?" Duo asked weakly. "Here, on Center?"

"They must be desperate."

"Or very, very stupid. Should we do anything? Or just wait for some arcane disaster to blast them to smithereens." Center reacted violently to many pieces of technology. Mana sinks were the proverbial lighting rod in the thunderstorm.

"We're pretty far from any source here, and the night is calm. They might get away with it. I wonder why they took the risk though. I'm also wondering why they shot at you."

"Er-"

Steps echoed, approaching the caravan from down the road, quite openly.

"Heero, wait!" Trowa snapped as a man stepped out of the shadows and into the silver light bathing the road. Heero's eyes narrowed and he kept his wrist pointed at the intruder, but he didn't fire.

The man was short and sturdy and walked like a sailor, bowed legs rolling with long strides. His outfit was typical of a cabalist, a lightweight pressure suit that outlined the bulges of his round body. He was bald, like most people who lived in space and didn't want to mess around with hair when slamming on a helmet during catastrophic depressurization. His features were hard and grim, his brown eyes steady. He appeared to be in his forties. He had a gun at his side, and he held a small globe in one fist. To Duo and Trowa the object seemed to warp the air around them as it interfered with their ability to tap into Center’s ambient magic field.

Trowa moved forward slowly until he was level with Heero. "Why did you attack us?"

The man stared at him, then at Heero. He appeared to be weighing them.

"As I thought. He lied to you too, didn't he." The man smiled with savage confirmation.

"Who lied to us? What do you want?" Trowa's voice was carefully neutral, he almost sounded bored.

The man’s gaze darted towards Duo, who, senses muffled by the sink, reacted a bit too late.

"Che!" Duo bucked and writhed to try to break the iron grip of the man who had sneaked up on him - on him! - from around the vardo. "What the hell?! Leggo!"

"You two gentlemen have a choice." The man's voice was jubilant, with a hard edge that spoke of impatience to deal with Trowa and Heero and get on to the main business, which was bound to be unpleasant. His eyes were on Duo. Another man had joined the first, running up past the vardo. They had circled around the trio while the other man distracted them. Trowa's eyes narrowed and his crossbow, held at chest height, pointed at the leader menacingly, but the bald man continued to talk regardless. "You can either let us go about our business, or you can die. There are two snipers in the hills, and they have you in their sights. But before we get excited-" Heero had tensed and started to scowl "-you need to know who you've been traveling with. You have no reason to die for that creature. You'd best be on your way."

Trowa smiled slightly. "I'm sorry, but I don't feel like leaving without my friend, unless you -"

"Friend? Shinigami has no friends," the man snarled. "He only has puppets."

"Shinigami?" Trowa said slowly.

Shit...Duo glared at the man towering over him. They'd dragged him out from the shadow of the vardo into the moonlight. The man restraining him was a cyborg, he could tell by the absolute immobility of the arms holding him like steel shackles. The other guy leering down at him was yet another techno-cabalist, younger, in his thirties, pressure suit stretched over hard muscles, with a very square face, thick lips and shorn brown hair. Duo didn't like the look in his fixed eyes. At all. Cruelty and lunacy seemed to jostle for dominance.

"Trowa? Heero?" Duo licked his lips. "D-do something. Hey!"

The man had grabbed his chin and brought his face closer.

"He's very pretty, isn't he," he said to no one in particular. His voice was bland. His eyes were not. The cyborg behind him grunted. “Think I can take that apart?”

"Just a minute-" Trowa snapped, glaring at the sadist then at the leader.

"Stand down," the leader told him. "This is none of your business. Shinigami owes us a lot of deaths, a lot of money, and a lot of pain and grief. Ranke over there has a particular axe to grind." His mouth twisted with slight distaste. "I'm in no mood to refuse him if he decides to take his payback out in pain."

Ranke dropped his hand to Duo's leather vest and jerked. His smile broadened as the leather, in appearance worn and a bit tattered, didn't give in the slightest. He lazily drew out a serrated knife, edges sparkling in the moonlight. Duo tried to shove back against the cyborg, but it was like trying to topple a mountain. "Trowa!"

"If you have business with my friend, I would accept that you settle this in a court of law," Trowa said tightly, eyes flicking towards the hills around them. "But I'm not about to let you-... do _this_ uncontested." Next to him, Heero, eyes fierce, slowly put his hands together and cracked his knuckles. Wing seemed to hum in agreement as well.

Duo's voice rang with relief. "Yeah, this is a stupid mistake! Honest! Let's take this to an adjudicator, or hell, anybody! I've got references! I've got friends! They'll tell you I'm not Shi No Kami! I'm just a hunter from the Regio, I-"

His words faltered. Heero had tensed, turned around and was staring at him. Duo felt his heart clench under the fierce scrutiny. "H-Heero... ?"

"-killed our master, stole our most valued artifact-" the leader was talking to Trowa with the intensity of a fanatic. Many techno cabalists took their worship of machines to a degree that most religious fundamentalists would balk at. "We'd take him back to our mothership for execution, but we can't risk transporting him. He's tricky and powerful. He hides himself well too. It took us ages to find him. We've been following every trace of major power signature around Center for a year. He finally slipped up tonight, threw a blast that showed up on our dials, allowed us to track his mana residue to -"

"Duo's been with us, or just down the road, for the last twenty four hours," Trowa said sharply. "He's not- hey, stop that!" He turned as Ranke stuck a big hand over Duo's mouth and slowly slit the ties of his vest, one by one. "Leave him or-" The crossbow leapt to his shoulder and he sighted down the shaft.

Heero put out his hand and slowly lowered the bow's point.

Trowa stared at the silent man. So did Duo, over Ranke's stifling hand.

"Heero-" Trowa started.

Heero hooked a hand under his elbow and dragged the shaman a few steps away. "Leave them."

Duo squirmed and twisted his mouth away from Ranke's hand. "Heero! You're not gonna let them hurt me?! I swear I'm not this guy they think I am! Heero, please!"

Heero turned towards him slowly. "No. You're not the man they think you are. Shi No Kami."

Duo froze, staring at Heero. He didn't even flinch as Ranke cut the rest of his vest and shirt open with one slice of the knife, exposing his pale chest.

"Heero?" Trowa asked tightly. "What's going on? We can't let them torture Duo."

Heero merely crossed his arms. His eyes on Duo were blank, uncaring. He appeared to be waiting for something.

Duo slowly sunk his head and bit his lip. And, very faintly, along the link of the Mark, he could hear Quatre laughing...

"Hear that, Ranke?" The leader smiled, though he kept a careful eye on Trowa and Heero. "Apparently you can go ahead. These two gentlemen won't mind. And the dampener will keep him nice and quiet and in our grasp this time. He won't slip away from us. Get him to tell you where he hid the sacred sphere. Then have fun killing him slowly."

"Heero-" Trowa hissed.

Two thuds, a meaty ripping sound, a gargled scream-

"Couldn't go much slower than that with those two losers, friend. But it _was_ fun while it lasted."

The cyborg was flat on his back, his face smashed in, leaving a mosaic of flesh, blood and bone as a grim parody of features. Ranke was on his knees, the gurgling scream dying as he grasped his slashed throat with one hand and his ripped abdomen with the other, a sheen of gut glimmering in the moonlight. He spasmed and fell over to his side, twitching like a hare in a noose, blood splashing with each convulsion.

Duo straightened up. His hand, still lifted from the blow that had connected with Ranke's jugular was empty...but the short leather glove gleamed as if it were made of black steel and razor blades. 

"Don't move!" the leader shouted and made an urgent gesture with his fist. His eyes were wide and enraged in the moonlight.

Two small red dots appeared on Duo's bared chest. They danced a bit and settled, trembling, over his heart.

"Oh yeah, the snipers," Duo said absently, looking down at the spots. His gaze twitched up-

The dots suddenly flared and light shot back up the sighting lasers' beams like two bullets made of fire. The dots on Duo's chest winked out just as a panicked shot echoed through the hills.

Something whined in the air and pinged off of a worn, leather jerkin as if hitting tempered plate mail.

Duo absently rubbed his chest where the bullet had impacted a fold of innocent-looking leather. The jerkin rustled, and suddenly twisted under its own volition and started repairing the slashes Ranke had left, knotting up its own ties. Its owner bestowed a dangerous look at the man who had attacked him.

The leader had drawn his gun and was pointing it at Duo's head. His other hand clutching the mana sink trembled. He’d probably just realized that he could count on it to reduce a mage's power down to almost nothing - but that ‘ _almost_ nothing' was a very relative concept when dealing with a particularly powerful mage. "Stay where you are!"

"Hmm, no," Duo said, taking one step forward.

The leader's hand trembled. "You won't get away with this." Duo's grin broadened and he took two more slow steps. "Others will come. We will hound you until we retrieve the sacred sphere of Ophed from -"

"Nai no- " Duo's eyebrows shot up as he stopped his slow move towards the man. "Is that what this is about? Hell man, I fenced that piece of junk for the price of a bad beer over a year ago! You really ran halfway across the galaxy for that?!"

The leader's face twisted in a snarl of fury and fear. The report of the gun cracked and echoed against the cliff behind the vardo.

Duo's hand was in front of his face, palm out. The bullet had ricochéd off the short buttoned glove and off into the darkness.

The man's face tightened, but before he could fire again, the violet eyes dropped to the mana sink in the man's hand. 

Heero suddenly jerked Trowa back and spun him around to place himself between the shaman and Duo's attacker, Wing's energy shield rippling. 

The sink glowed briefly, overcharged and exploded like a grenade.

The carcass hit the ground with a thud. Duo shrugged, then looked around slowly. Without surprise, as Heero pushed Trowa away gently and took three steps forward. 

In the stillness of the night, Wing clicked and rustled. 

Duo smirked, but his eyes were hard as they lighted on the bracer pointing at him with deadly intent. "So that's how it's gonna be, is it, Heero?"

Heero said nothing. Power started to dance along the wrist guard.

Duo turned slightly. "Heero...Yuy...Heero Yuy. The one and only. I can't believe I missed that. Trowa told me your name, but his accent stinks."

He saw Trowa’s startled eyes jump to Heero as if the shaman remembered something, but then he was staring at Duo again, and the crossbow was wavering slowly towards his former ally.

Heero said nothing.

Duo's eyes blazed. " **Who are you?!** ”

Trowa started at what had to sound like an alien tongue snapped out, rich with power. 

Heero showed no signs of comprehension.

" **Answer!** Answer! **What are you?!** "

Duo's eyes narrowed dangerously at Heero's unbroken silence.

" **You-**... Goddammit, I know you understand-... .Who are you!?" Duo snarled, glaring at the bracer threatening him. "And put that thing away if you want to keep your arm!"

Heero snorted very softly. His voice, when he spoke, was as cold and unemotional as always. "Release Quatre."

Duo's eyes narrowed. "What makes you think I'm responsible for his condition?"

Heero said nothing. But his arm slowly tensed as he sighted down it.

Duo smiled, a cold movement of the lips. "You know, I like a mystery as well as the next guy, but now you're getting annoying. I wasn't anywhere near Quatre when he went haywire and attacked Fen, so why should I be blamed for-"

"The word on his forehead, 'Shirushi'. It's keeping him asleep." Heero's voice dropped to a menacing whisper. "Take it off - Shi No Kami."

Duo's mouth continued to move on automatic for a second, but his voice had vanished.

"...Okay. I'm kinda intrigued now," he finally said. "When did you see the Mark? You were tied to the wall when I had to force him under." And Quatre had been pre-programmed to attack Fen as soon as they were about to leave, with or without Zero. The Mark was only briefly visible when control was challenged or exerted.

In a blinding flash Duo remembered Heero rubbing at Quatre's forehead earlier. Had he been rubbing at the Mark, and not the ocher? But...that made no sense! Could he see it all this time? Why hadn't he said anything before today, then? Like, 'Hey, Quatre, what's that thing you have scribbled on your forehead?' Ah no, he never asked questions. Huh. So not only could he see the Mark, but he'd been able to read the Old Tongue word for 'control'. Heero had also associated it with someone who bore a name in that same language.

Duo was more than intrigued. And reminded once more that Heero's short, incomprehensible sentences were no indication that he was stupid.

"Trowa. Leave," Heero said.

Duo eyes widened a bit. "Let's not be too hasty, 'Ro. I'll release blondie if you tell me how you can see my Mark."

Heero sneered and fired.

Duo cursed and dodged the nearly invisible wave of force with a speed that left even Heero staggering to adjust his aim. Duo threw himself forward, rolled -

"Heero don't kill him! It might not free Quatre!" Trowa shouted, finally recovering from the shock of the attack.

\- Duo leapt like a cat dodging another low bolt aiming at his legs and -

“Hee- Fuck!” Trowa staggered back, crossbow swinging up way too late. Duo had materialized right behind Heero and grabbed him. 

Heero was about as pliable as a steel girder, but Duo had been fighting dirty for years now. He kept Heero’s arms wrenched up, one elbow bent inward and pressing into the man’s spine, knowing every joint must be screaming - but this was no time for playing nice. Hips turned and shoving Heero forward, keeping him off balance, stopped him from breaking free.

"Right!" Duo gasped. "Won't say that wasn't one of the best workouts I had in awhile-" he was panting a bit, and his muscles tensed under the jerkin as Heero snarled and tugged his arms forward "- but I can't afford to get fried right now, so just relax and-"

Duo couldn’t see Heero’s face- body language alone gave him a second of warning. He was smart enough to let go rather than try to keep the hold, but he wasn’t fast enough for all that. The blast emanating like a wall of force from Heero's entire body picked him up and shoved him back hard. Heero staggered forward as Duo relinquished his hold, but recovered quickly, twisting on himself to level a bolt at the braided man on the ground behind him. 

Somewhere off to the left, the horses were scurrying down the road despite their hobbles. The vardo was still rocking a bit. 

One of Heero’s rare expressions settled on his features. Not amazement at seeing Duo stand up, unharmed, at the end of an impressively long slide mark scoring earth and rock. Not surprise that his target hadn’t been turned into little Duo chunks. Not disgust at the way an old moth-eaten leather jerkin was oozing and twitching into new, disturbing shapes. 

Heero stood still, waiting, as Duo stepped forward. And the small smile on his face was familiar to his observers; he was pleased with himself. And he was expecting a good fight from Duo. Before he killed him.

Duo sighed and absently rolled his shoulders. A far-off sensation...oh, a prong of rock had scored his upper arm.

Roiling darkness covered the injury, lapsed back like the tide. 

Where it receded, nothing but pale skin. 

On Duo’s next step, rocks crunched under boots as hard as steel and the darkness flowed into a new shape. Rips, blood, dirt, dust, gone. What was left; smooth, hard, so dark it devoured the faint light from moon and stars. It slipped and tightened over Duo’s legs, cinching in close, roiled down to his hands, leaving palms clear to cast, and daggers of darkness at the fingertips. 

"Ei, Heero...you look like you're having fun." Duo felt the smile tip and sway, the chorus was rising like stormwinds inside...

"Hn." Heero dropped into a defensive stance, an invitation to Duo to do his worst.

"Unfortunately I can't afford to fight you right now.” Duo tried to keep the creeping giggle out of his voice. “You see, I don't want to hurt you. No really. Well, most of me doesn’t." 

He lifted a hand, flexing fingers. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Trowa focus on the gloves, on the cut-out palms. The shaman quickly lowered the headband over his eyes and brought his armored bracer up in a defensive position, runes glinting in moonlight. Ol’ Tro can spot spellcaster mitts when he sees them, Duo thought, as hyena laughter echoed from deep inside. The shaman was thinking ahead.

Just not far enough. 

Heero’s eyes twitched and widened in alarm. 

Trowa spun with a gasp.

Quatre was standing at the entrance to the vardo, looking incuriously at the scene before him. He seemed tired but otherwise fine. 

Trowa was a Nightwalker. He had to _know_ it was a trick. But some instincts were hotwired into humans ( **most humans/not human/we are** ) and what could you do, right? 

"Trowa!" Heero barked ( **stalemated mate / can’t move / you can’t move one and only / or we will kill you / no need him still / but he doesn’t know that** )

Quatre’s face was perfectly placid as he lifted a hand and blasted Trowa full in the chest just as the shaman reached him.

Trowa’s body hit the dirt. Just like that other one had earlier.

Heero stood there. Staring. Still no expression. What would it take to get feelings onto that face? ( **Should we find out?/ no yes no** )

“He’s not dead,” Duo said, to see if that would do it.

Nothing.

“He could have been. But I still need them.”

Still nothing. No expression. No movement either. And by then it was too late, Quatre was there, between them. **Checkmate**.

See? See? Duo told Quatre lazily - past the screams of agony and fury echoing up the Mark - if he had Zero, he’d know how to break this deadlock. Or he’d at least move instead of standing there like a lump. **Che, worm / human, not human, still useless.**

"Well, that's left you with only a few options, Heero," Duo said with an easy smile as he crossed his arms on his chest. "I can't begin to understand how you think sometimes. I don't know if you can learn something from someone, or listen to advice, but here it is anyway. There's more to fighting and winning a war than being the strongest. The important thing is knowledge. Recognizing the places to apply your strength to the best effect. I am not your enemy, Heero. I know you seem driven to perfect your fighting skills. And you would learn a lot by fighting me, if I didn't kill you. But we would be so much stronger together. You do kick considerable ass, but it isn't yet enough for what's coming. Know how and where to apply your strength if you want to use it fully. We'll be seeing each other again."

Duo's smile became impish as he lifted his right hand and waved a cheeky goodbye with a waggle of his fingers, then he reached forward, touched the hand to Quatre's forehead for a second, and vanished as if the darkness had momentarily vanquished the moonlight and spirited him away.

\---

 

Heero blinked at the empty space, eyes widening at the small eddies of dust that were all that was left of his adversary. 

Quatre choked, stumbled and fell to his knees. Then he was up like a shot, staggering towards Trowa. He continued to squirm forwards, eyes on the shaman's still form, even when Heero intercepted him.

"Wh- lemme- I have to-" Quatre's face was pale and twisted in panic.

Heero's hand gripped his chin firmly and tilted the healer's head left and right under the moonlight, his eyes on Quatre's forehead. A puzzled look crossed his features, but he relinquished the healer who darted over to Trowa and put trembling hands on his chest, healing the injuries. Heero remained where he was, staring off into the darkness. He began to scowl, but someone who knew him would think the expression was a bit less confident than it usually was.

 

Next Chapter: The Eye Of The Beholder

Weapons of mass destruction are not cute and fluffy. Neither are spells that work like computers.


	20. The Eye Of The Beholder

Trowa's senses touched the lines around him instinctively. They soothed him. He was in his bed, in the Sanctuary. A warm fire crackled nearby. Quatre was by his side, rubbing his hand with a gentle thumb. Svale was sitting on the foot of the bed with - Trowa's senses informed him with quiet resignation - her hand slipped under the cover where she was groping his ankle, knee and toes a bit distractedly. They were talking in hushed voices, but he was too tired to make out their words, and he sighed, wondering why his chest hurt.

...Chest...?

"- would need physical contact to lay it on, but then the mark can stay dormant and invisible for - Eep!" Svale fell off the bed with a thump as Trowa bolted up into a sitting position, his eyes wide as they fastened on a pale and startled Quatre. 

"Fen- Duo- you shot me!" Trowa blurted. 

He only wanted to recap the events whose memories were hammering him like pile-drivers, but he immediately caught his mistake as the pale face went rigid with pain. Quatre scrambled off the bed and Trowa, ignoring his aching chest and the fatigue welded to his bones, used his long arms to dive forward, tackle the healer back onto the covers and into his embrace. He squeezed the young man as hard as he could - which wasn't very much at that point - until he felt the body he was holding begin to relax a little.

"You're okay," he mumbled into Quatre's shoulder. "You're back. You- you are okay, right?" The lines were once more familiar and free, though he was too weary to look closely.

"He's fine! It's you we need to check, now you're awake," Svale snapped, scuttling up the bed to stand near Trowa. "Move out of the way, Rabbit."

Quatre leaned back and his blond hair was replaced by a close-up of Svale's nose, eyes and wrinkles, which was less appealing. Trowa tried to inch away, curl his lover back into his arms again, but a hand like a knotted tree root caught his chin and jerked his head down an inch to Svale's level. Her free hand patted him on the forehead, lifting his bangs, then dropped down the side of his face, felt his chest gently...

"Hmm..." she muttered, sending her unique blend of smells - old dust, fresh liquor - wafting over the shaman. Her hand dropped to his abdomen then patted his thigh. "Hmmmmmm..."

"Stop pretending you're still looking for something and get your hands off him, Svale." Quatre was hugging himself, still pale, but he managed a weak smile at the old witch.

"Just checking, Rabbit! The mark can be anywhere, you know! Trowa, my lad, I'm gonna have to ask you to strip and -"

Quatre's hand hooked her by the collar and peeled her off. "Duo would not be able to get near Trowa with any bad intentions, Svale, and you know it. He's not put any spell on him. Now get off."

Svale sniffed and looked offended, but took a step back, relinquishing her spot to the healer again. Quatre took Trowa's hands, felt his pulse and looked into his eyes with clinical detachment.

"The blast damaged your lungs, broke four ribs and bruised your muscles badly," he said quietly. "I've healed the worst of it. You'll feel tired for a few days, but you should be fine."

"I feel fine now," Trowa lied. "How are you? What happened?"

Quatre sighed. Trowa looked at him more closely. His face was pale and he looked tired, and there was...something else, a distance, an aloofness that he didn't recognize. Or rather, it was like the quiet concentration Quatre used when healing serious wounds, mastering the weaving of flesh and mind and bone with deceptive ease. Except this was devoid of the compassion, warmth and joy that shone from him during those occasions. Oh, those qualities were still there - Trowa had instinctively plunged below the surface, hunting the dysfunction along the well-known pattern - but they were now disassociated from-

Trowa started as a gentle hand covered his eyes, interrupting his reading. "Don't," Quatre whispered gently. "You'll only make yourself sick if you push yourself when you're this tired."

Trowa couldn't disagree, his head had started spinning from that small effort. He leaned back against the pillows. Quatre helped him settle against the headboard, while he wondered how the healer had known Trowa was trying to read him.

"I'll tell you what happened - briefly - since you probably won't get to sleep until I do. I'm afraid we don't know much, though. Duo-... do you remember-"

"I remember everything up until-" you shot me- "that is, I remember those men, and Duo and Heero fighting. And Fen before that." A shadow passed in front of Quatre's eyes. "What did Duo do to you?"

"I can't tell you much," Quatre said carefully. "He used some kind of spell on me."

"It's called a mark of control. Or a shiai dai shirushi if you want to get technical and use its Old Tongue name," Svale interposed. "A very old type of spell. But still effective. Maxie was an excellent mage. He put the whammy on poor Rabbit in a record short time, as soon as he caught him alone-"

"At the drums festival," Trowa said abruptly, another memory coming back. "I knew - felt - there was something wrong."

"It normally takes hours of careful preparation and rituals - and the occasional torture session - for a mark of control to stick. Maxie did it in three minutes by scratching his nose as close as I can make out." Trowa assumed she was speaking metaphorically.

"It was like falling into an abyss," Quatre said quietly, eyes distant.

"And it was so well done it was invisible even to you, Trowa," Svale continued cheerfully with a hint of admiration in her tones. "It left Rabbit completely unaware of the interference until he was in a position to carry out the standing order the mark imposed, and then it activated to control and subdue him."

"But now?" Trowa said, looking at Quatre carefully. "Are you-"

"Duo lifted it before he disappeared," Quatre said, his voice neutral. "After he made me shoot you. I-"

"You didn't mean it, Quatre," Trowa interrupted quickly.

Blue eyes were candid as the healer shrugged. "I know," he said simply. "He lifted it and left. I don't know why. I...we spoke last night, briefly, but he didn't say much. When he was gone, Heero and I drove the vardo to the planet-hopper those men used and called Howard to pick us up. That was twelve hours ago. We've not seen Duo since. We don't know who he is or what he wanted. That's all."

"Oh..." Trowa tried to think, but his mind felt gummed up and his chest throbbed. He refrained from examining it though, he didn't want to hurt Quatre by reminding him of the episode. The healer looked fine with it, but Trowa knew his lover a bit better than that.

"Duo... " The shaman muttered, his hand rubbing Quatre's arm absently. "I can't believe it. All this time... and for what? Why did- " Trowa stiffened and his hands tightened on Quatre's arms as another memory emerged. "Zero? What happened with-... "

Quatre shrugged again and smiled reassuringly, but behind his shoulder Svale - who was massaging Trowa's thigh purely for medicinal purposes - suddenly looked very grave and her eyes shot a warning. Trowa's heart flinched.

"We're not quite sure about that either," Quatre said, his eyes unreadable. Trowa managed to refrain from reading his lines. He felt too tired to cope with what he could find there, and Svale's warning glance told him he'd find it. "I may be stuck with it. But it's okay, it's not doing anything right now, I managed to stabilize it. Don't worry about it. I want you to rest now. You need more sleep if you're going to get better." Firm but gentle hands pushed Trowa back against the pillows.

"Stay with me," Trowa said, catching Quatre's fingers as he rose from the bed.

"Of course." The healer smiled gently, and disengaged his hand just long enough to toss Svale out of the bedroom before returning to curl up carefully next to Trowa. A soothing hand brushed the bangs from his face, then their fingers entwined. "Rest. Things will be clearer later," Quatre whispered.

Trowa's eyes closed, dragged down by fatigue that seemed to have seeped into every cell in his body. He let his skin concentrate on the trickle of Quatre's breath on his cheek, the hand in his, the warmth of the healer's body near his own. Things were quite clear now...he never wanted to move again.

\---

Svale lost the good-natured pout she'd worn for Rabbit when he'd kicked her out. She stomped down the hallways of the sanctuary looking thoughtful.

Maxie. Now there was a turnaround for the books. What was he up to? He was so young - his appearance was not an illusion, she could feel it in her bones. How could he have so much control, knowledge and power at his age? Why had he used it to attack Fen? Why had he used _Quatre_ to attack Fen when it sounded like he would be able to take out the old man by himself? And why force Zero onto Quatre?

And the other big question: what would Maxie be doing next? She knew he wasn't about to give up with-...whatever it was he was trying to use them for; not because of this little upset. Shinigami. Or rather, if Heero had been right, Shi No Kami, which was a whole lot scarier. The God Of Death. In the Old tongue of power no less. Shit. But he wasn't a god, she knew that. For one he didn't need no source to be able to kick butt and take names. And he needed Trowa, Quatre and Heero for something. Gods tended to be very independent (not to say stubborn pig-headed -... lightning bolt, remember, lightning bolt). How much had he been manipulating them from the start? Shinigami. He stole stuff. Powerful magical items. But nothing had vanished since he'd appeared. Quite the contrary... Svale's eyes narrowed and the gleam in them would have surprised those who didn't know her well. Quite the contrary; a lot of things had shown up in the Sanctuary since he'd popped up out of nowhere. Did that mean...

Svale hesitated before her door. She should go and have another crack at the next mystery on her list. Heero. He'd apparently known something about Maxie. And he was a pretty big question mark himself. A _pretty_ big question mark. Very pretty. But he didn't trust her - if his habit of punching her through walls was any indication - so she doubted she'd get anything from him. He seemed to be attached to Quatre and Trowa though, who knew why. Once Trowa was up-

Svale froze in the doorway as the door swung open. Magic crackled reflexively along her staff, an indication of how worried and off-balance she was as she rarely displayed any power openly.

Someone had been in her room.

She approached the desk carefully. It was clear of the usual mess of scrolls and artifacts, they'd been unceremoniously dumped on her bed. There were three books open on the desk instead. She hopped up on the high stool she used and looked at them carefully without touching them. Two of the books were hers. The Jishin book they'd recently found with the sanctuary key. A techno book on magnetic resonance and planetary factoids, which she had never bothered to throw away. And a book she'd never seen before, ancient in appearance. Her eyes widened slowly as she took in the pages on which they were open. They seemed unrelated - and she didn't know the new book well enough to guess what that one was getting at - but the very superposition of those open pages had sparked an idea in her head. Several ideas. Oh yes.

"Well done, Maxie," she said coldly. "I get it. Wanna come out and discuss this like a reasonable adult?"

Nothing happened for three seconds. Then she turned slowly as she felt a presence in the previously empty space behind her.

Duo was leaning against the door in his old casual leathers, a small smile on his face, relaxed as if he'd been there all along.

Svale looked at him warily.

Duo lifted a finger, put it slowly to his lips, then opened the door and slipped out noiselessly.

Svale hesitated, not sure she would be able to do much. But then Heero was in his room just down the hallway, and she had a feeling he'd love a rematch with the Maxwell mystery. She bounced off the stool, hurled herself to the door, wrenched it open-

Wasn't very surprised, and even mildly relieved, when the hallway outside turned out to be empty...

She turned back to the books. A lot of studying ahead of her. But she had a better idea of where Maxie stood now. A cold, manipulative, secretive son of a bitch, sure, but she was ready to bet they had a common enemy. Should she tell the others? She remembered the finger on his lips, enjoining her to secrecy. No, better say nothing. Emotions were high. She had a feeling the others would have a knee-jerk reaction to anything Duo-esque in the near future, and she didn't have time for tempers to cool and wiser heads to prevail. Which was of course exactly what he'd been aiming for. Damn and blast the brat! She was his senior by a pretty phenomenal number of years, she shouldn't have to dance to his tune, and lie to her friends to boot! But she didn't have a choice.

She had a feeling that, for Maxie to have moved this openly, things with Jusan might be coming to a head a bit quicker than previously thought. The Scourge was still far away, but his minions could always rip Ether and get here in weeks. He might send an army ahead of him. Or a herald! Now that would be a disaster.

She quickly bent to study the books.

\--- 

There was no fuzzy amnesia to cushion the shock this time. Trowa woke confused, angry about Duo, in pain and very unhappy about the lack of Quatre anywhere near the bed.

It was nighttime again and the moon was shining into the room. He glanced around, feeling the tug of a familiar pattern.

Quatre was at the window, looking out. He was bare-chested, hugging himself as if he were cold. The moonlight bleached his hair white; it smoothed the drawn, tired features and smudged eyes into a vision of alabaster and pearl. His skin shone like nacre, a nipple casting a minute blue shadow near one of his crossed arms.

"Beautiful."

Exactly what Trowa had been thinking, but it was Quatre who said the word. His voice was soft, a whisper of reluctant wonder.

"What is?" Trowa asked absently. 

He tensed to shove the covers back and get up to join his lover when Quatre said: "Don't. You really shouldn't be moving for another twelve hours."

Trowa subsided, feeling slightly uneasy. The aloofness was still there. Quatre hadn't looked at him. He opened his mouth to ask if everything was alright.

"It is beautiful..." Quatre said. His hands rubbed his arms. "It all connects. It's like an echo of...of everything, contained in miniature. So detailed. So precise. Like clockwork. No...not that inorganic or logical. It flows like water set in stone...Damn, now I know why you can never tell me what you see with that eye of yours." 

The shaman felt his soul grow cold. "Quatre? Are you using Zero?"

Quatre half turned away from the window. "Using it? No."

"Good, because I really think-"

"I don't need to. It's already altered my perceptions enough that I can see the lines without it."

Trowa stared at his lover. The indifferent tone chilled him as much as the words.

"Don't worry," Quatre added absently, looking out the window again. "Doing that much won't harm me."

"What will?" Trowa asked pointedly.

Quatre's eyes turned inward as if weighing what he should say. Trowa felt a jab of pain add itself to the worry.

"I don't know. It's a bit tricky. For me to be able to use Zero properly, I need to let it alter me, my perceptions, my thought patterns. Otherwise I won't be able to handle it, to absorb its output without going- without getting distressed. But the ways it wants to change me...The alterations were tailored for a Jishin, and I don't have their power or capability." He was speaking calmly, as if discussing one of his patients. "If I can adapt to the changes, then it will make controlling Zero easier. Which is good because if I can't control it, I might end up using it instinctively and improperly, and that might-" he interrupted himself with a quick sideways glance at Trowa. "That might not be wise," he added carefully. 

Trowa found himself gripping the covers until his hands shook.

Quatre's voice was still curiously distant and thoughtful. "The problem of course, is that each change Zero wants to make in me might-...also lead to unfortunate results. If I had better control over Zero, I'd be able to make sure it only made the changes that can't harm me, but of course to control Zero that much it has to alter me considerably to do so. There's a certain irony there. Svale says the best is not to use it at all and just-"

"Yes. And we'll do our best to get rid of the damn thing," Trowa bit out.

Quatre's eyes were still on the moonlit scene. He neither agreed or disagreed.

"So...do you see the lines?" Trowa asked, trying to lighten the mood, reassure himself and Quatre. They'd sort this out. In the meantime he wanted to get his lover's mind off of spell-imposed changes and possible misfortunes, to concentrate on something less grim. "Can you see the Moon's Path? The Wiccan Way? The flow of the Dragon? Oh, you don't know which name go with which line, I guess. I..." Trowa surprised himself by managing a smile, as he found one small gem of consolation in this mess. "I can teach you to read the lines. If you want. I-"

"I see the Sanctuary," Quatre said. "I'm not surprised it gives you the occasional headache. It bends everything around it like a lead ball on a loose sheet. How can you stand being here? It must be painful for you."

Trowa smoothed the rumpled covers under his hands as they unclenched. 'For _you?_ '

"It's only been this bad since Svale repaired it-"

"Duo repaired it. Svale just used the key to activate it. But it was too damaged to-"

"How do you know that?"

Quatre glanced at him in surprised and then smiled, his eyes crinkling. He looked more like himself. Blond curls rustled as he rubbed the back of his head. "Oh, it's...I can apparently recognize Duo's...fingerprints, I guess you-"

"Pattern," Trowa corrected him absently.

"Right, pattern, and he's left traces of himself all over the place. The underground passages are just steeped in them."

"What underground passages?"

"The very deep and complex ones that lead all the way down to the Source." Quatre chuckled. "Svale is going to be very busy in the coming days. I should be able to show her how to get there - without using Zero, relax. I just need to read the Sanctuary lines until I find the entrance."

Quatre's eyes dropped to the floor. He put his hands behind his back and took a small step forward, balancing his weight at the hips. He took another step, his face smoothing into thoughtful lines. Moonlight and shadows played across his bare chest. Three small deliberate steps further, and he balanced and turned on one foot, then put his other foot down carefully. He looked like he was deep in thought and only partly concentrating on what he was doing.

"Duo has done a lot of work," he said absently, visibly following his own train of thought. He swayed a bit and put the next foot before the other, now heading towards the door. Two steps. "No wonder he was so tired and stressed out before we left. I think he was repairing the sanctuary and also gearing it for something." He turned by rising on the balls of his feet and twisting thirty degrees, then stood swaying back and forth, knees locked, eyes on the floor and hands behind his back, like a little boy about to walk across stepping stones. "The whole point of all Duo did was to prepare for something. I'm pretty certain it's Jusan's arrival. But what he's preparing...I think he's Jusan's enemy, but we can't be sure. There's a chance he could be working for the Scourge and he infiltrated our group to see what Svale and the other Guardians would do to oppose him. We just don't know." He sighed with something like resignation and took two longer steps across unseen chasms in the floor. 

Trowa was staring at Quatre's feet, frowning.

"What are you doing?"

Quatre glanced up in surprise. The last steps had taken him close to the bed.

"Oh, just...following one of the patterns."

Trowa stared hard at the floor with both his eyes. "I can't see anything."

"It's one of the Sanctuary lines. It's...Zero is jishin, so I guess it's more attuned to them than your shamanism is." Quatre grinned at his feet, though his eyes held little warmth, only clinical curiosity. "I swear these patterns are bizarre. I'm willing to bet a jishin couldn't think in a straight line if you ran him over with a steamroller. What a weird race."

Though his face didn't change, Trowa felt suddenly sad. The lines Quatre thought were beautiful, he knew without asking...they'd been the ones generated by the Sanctuary, not the lines of nature and earth around it.

Quatre took another, more deliberate step towards the bed and looked down at his lover. Trowa glanced up as he felt eyes running slowly over his lanky frame, his bare, bruised chest, the lean fall of his hips and long legs.

"You're beautiful..." Quatre whispered.

Trowa smiled slightly and took a pale hand in his, pulling Quatre to sit down on the side of the bed. Quatre didn’t cease that slow scrutiny of his body. His expression was the same as it was at the window though. A touch of wonder. Curiosity. Analytical interest. And a slight pain.

Trowa watched a slim finger extend slowly and touch his chest. It moved after a few seconds and trailed bit by bit across his sternum to a spot just below the left nipple. Quatre broke the line, dropped to another an inch below it, a slight frown marring the clear expression of his face.

Trowa's eyes and senses brushed over his own lines, sharing his lover's vision. The powerful straight line of his tree of life, the backbone of his being, ran from chakra to chakra, from his crown to his foundation at the base of the spine. From each chakra, the branches ran from his ganglia across to different organs; from them hung the delicate lace of his lymphatic and nervous systems, with little twists and knots at the more important pressure points. Other systems - magnetic, energetic, emotic, base and high - coiled and crisscrossed in compound geometries. Above it all lay the ghost of his aura, the complex pattern that linked his body and mind to the flow and ebb of nature around him. Sparkles and flashes of vectors ran from each of these systems to the other, connecting them. Each system changed with a twitch of muscle, an emotion, a cold breeze, a flux in the magnetic field. Each change cascaded on to the next system to which it was linked, and the next, and the next. A human being was a pool of lines and geometries, separate yet connected, rippling and throbbing with life. From this morass, a shaman could detach and follow certain patterns to match a purpose, once again changing the whole, an ever-ongoing, intricate dance.

Trowa watched as Quatre nibbled his lips in concentration and drew his finger up the branch he was tracing, down the main line joining two of Trowa's vital chakras. He then edged off following, to Trowa's surprise, a line that belonged to his magnetic flow. The finger traced that to the end - Trowa smiled slightly as it tickled his sides an inch below the ribs - then drew up along yet another set of lines, his lover's pressure point paths. Trowa felt a shiver along his body. That was an unusual combination, and not necessarily pleasure inducing, but then again, with that adorable pout of concentration on Quatre's face and his gentle fingers anywhere on his body...Quatre could be tapping Trowa's nose and the shaman would still feel his pants getting tighter as they were now. Apparently his body had had enough rest to recuperate certain functions.

Quatre lifted the finger, but before Trowa could complain - and he most certainly would have - he put it back straight on Trowa's heart chakra and drew a brisk line down to the power chakra. There he hesitated. Trowa watched him curiously, his mind already playing with familiar parameters, the patterns that could be selected from the intricate mesh of the body, be traced with finger or mouth to stimulate and please; he'd used them many times on his lover. Quatre appeared unsure though. His finger was slower as it traced up the main line then followed a pressure point path, once more, across Trowa's lowest rib, until he reached the side, then back up again, across the twelfth branch of the life tree, towards the heart.

Quatre frowned and withdrew his hand. It dropped back into his lap slowly. His eyes remained fixed on Trowa's chest.

"Can you see them?" Trowa asked softly, then corrected himself. Obviously Quatre could see Trowa's lines. "Can you follow them to bring out a particular pattern? Without using Zero," he added quickly.

Quatre gave a half shrug, looking unhappy. "I can see. Sort of. Actually I can see certain useful points, and guess where the lines are from that, and how to use them."

"Useful points? You mean, acupuncture ganglia? You should be able to see some patterns, to heal the mind, or unblock energy lines, or for -" he wanted to add sexual stimulation, but hesitated as he saw Quatre's eyes, still fixed on his chest, harden, and the hands stiffen in his lap.

Quatre rose slowly and turned away. He paused, not quite looking at his lover.

"I see vital points, weaknesses and targets. Zero is a weapon. It's not concerned with your health or pleasure, Trowa. It's showing me how to kill you.

"You should rest now," he added as he returned to the same position by the window, arms crossed over his chest, eyes following lines Trowa could not see. The shaman stared, not knowing what to feel or think.

"Love...we have to get rid of this thing,” Trowa said, then unexpectedly swallowed a yawn. Damn, he was too tired to think about this, what with the last twenty-four hours- but no! They had to figure out how to- Trowa blinked rapidly and found his head sinking back into the pillow. They had to figure out how to get that spell from Quatre. That was...the top priority... 

He thought he felt something brush along his crown chakra. The lines around him danced briefly, but stilled before he could catch them at it...Damn Sanctuary...playing with the order of things again...give him a headache...he'd just close his eyes for a few seconds while he thought of how to get Zero away...from...

\---

Quatre's eyes once more focused on the scenery outside as he heard his lover's breathing steady and deepen. He didn't look at Trowa. He rubbed his blood-stained hands against his arms again, though he knew they wouldn't warm him, and started scrutinizing the patterns before him again. He was studying defensive patterns, key areas that would allow him to manipulate the leylines and magnetic fields, places that would allow him to thrust back evil influences if anything braided decided to show up here again. He was still an amateur though, even Svale was better at this than he was. Zero whispered equations in his mind, trying to tell him about the subtle geometries of the Sanctuary. The complexity of what Zero showed him increased until he could no longer follow, and he felt it nudge him gently; it would only require a small change to his mind to go further. Only a small increase in his ability to perceive and manipulate patterns. So he could defend Trowa and himself.

No. That would be...dangerous. Probably.

Zero's equations changed as it sensed his concern regarding the mutations; they informed him of ways the spell could change Quatre's mind so the healer could calculate the risk implied in changing him further. Quatre made a wry face at the catch, and Zero slunk away like a scolded puppy. For now.

He'd not use it. It would really be too risky.

His eyes narrowed at the way the moonlight tripped over coils and vectors outside.

No. He wouldn’t use it.

Unless he really needed to, of course.

 

\---

 

Next Chapter: Ringing The Bells Of War

Make it loud, make it proud. Kick an immortal power in the junk today.


	21. Ringing the Bells of War

Lines fluctuated in a slow dance around Quatre, shivers of the Sanctuary's effect on Center’s magnetic field, leylines, electrical currents and night tides. The view outside his window shimmered like northern lights in the back of his mind.

Quatre tried to ignore the mental view and concentrate on the scroll Trowa had given him. It was one of the rare texts on shamanism. Nightwalker knowledge and history was transmitted orally in the shape of stories, legends, symbolic painting, songs and even one or two dirty jokes. This text had actually been written by a Techno anthropologist, a kind-hearted soul who had obviously fallen in love with the rich, animalistic culture he was studying. He had written down some of their 'charming legends' and 'quaint beliefs', adding his scientific analysis regarding the stories and their significance to a primitive people. In the margin of his research paper, the shaman who had originally bought the copy out of curiosity had written several amused and derogatory comments about the blind fool who wouldn't know a line if he tripped over it. But the meat of the shamanistic knowledge on basic lines and patterns had been written down correctly, Trowa had assured Quatre, and would serve as a good primer to teach the healer what most Nightwalker children knew from the earliest age.

Quatre drew a pattern on the table - unconsciously following a curlicue working its way across the grain, echoing a larger one on the wall near his head, twisting under whatever Svale was putting the Sanctuary through today.

Trowa had wanted to teach him everything himself. Quatre didn't need no stupid lines to know that the shaman wanted nothing more than to curl up in front of the fire wrapped only in a blanket for two, telling him all the fantastic, often funny legends that helped illustrate the lines of Center and the universe around them.

Quatre had quickly manipulated the conversation away from personal tutoring before it had even been suggested, asking Trowa if he had any books that could teach the healer the basics without distracting the shaman from more important things - and had anyone else noticed how gloomy and silent Heero had been the last couple of days? Maybe Trowa should talk to him.

Quatre hated himself for the slight look of regret and hurt that had crossed Trowa's eyes and rippled through the lines of his mind and body.

His fingernail scored the wood of the desk, the slow scritch-scritch echoing the increased throbbing of the lines around him, and the rising anger in his mind.

He hated himself but he...he was angry at Trowa as well, for the fact the shaman was about to make that suggestion. For not understanding that Zero was a weapon of war and murder and didn't care for - Quatre's eyes dropped to the text in annoyance - for the Turtle's Tracks or the Great Bear's Way. It was like asking a bullet to care about the air it was slicing to reach its target. Actually - a sliver of wood made a little crackling sound as his fingers dug at the desk relentlessly - actually what he really resented was the fact that if Trowa understood this, understood just how Zero was showing him the world, just how warped his 'gentle healer' was going to get, he'd never accept that. Trowa had shown him how to fight, but he'd always preferred Quatre on the sidelines, always safe, Trowa was always trying to protect him and look where _that_ ended up: with the mage-bolt he'd taught Quatre to cast buried in Trowa's chest, and his lover would _never_ accept- what the hell was going on?!

Quatre stared down at his bloodied fingernail for a split second, at the whipping line he'd been trying to pin down into the wood's tattered grain, then he shot to his feet. The crash of the chair hitting the floor barely registered as the coiling of the sanctuary lines around him swamped his senses.

What- what was-...

This was going to end in one almighty bang!

_Trowa!_

Quatre lurched and stumbled blindly against the downed chair as it caught his legs. He righted himself and ran from the room, mind searching the pulsating lines for his lover's pattern.

 

\---

 

The Sanctuary had grown an extra mound like a huge boil at the top of the hill's crown. A select few of the ley stones had flocked to it like worshipers to a temple, and were now collected in two concentric rings. Three of them were lying on their sides in the center of the circles, at the very top of the mound, in a loose triangle.

Trowa looked at them with vague repulsion. Quatre might find the Sanctuary's pattern beautiful, but Trowa felt its unnatural manipulation of Center’s lines like a constant toothache. The way it was dragging ley stones around like leashed puppies was positively indecent.

It had gotten even worse in the past three days. The morning after their return to the sanctuary, Quatre had shown Svale the heavily concealed entrance to the Sanctuary's heart, burrowing deep beneath the earth. Trowa had been too weak to go with them, much to his annoyance and trepidation, but Quatre had described the scene to him, down to Svale squealing like a schoolgirl and lifting her skirts in a mad jig. Quatre had assured his lover that he was not scarred for life by the sight. To Trowa's relief, the healer had not accompanied her explorations, but had returned to care for his patient. Trowa knew that Svale could fend for herself - she was too tough to kill - and he wanted Quatre to stay as far away from anything jishin as was possible while living in one of their sanctuaries.

Svale had reappeared at dawn the next day, exhausted and with a wary light in her eye that Trowa recognized, however much she tried to disguise it by fondling anything that came within arm's reach and drinking enough to put an ox in a coma. She'd slept three hours then had gone out again, and at that point the Sanctuary started to seriously bend reality around it. Trowa felt the ache spread down into his very bones. Maybe he should have gone with Howard, who had left the day after they got back; the old man had left a note saying he would try to backtrack the cabalists who had attacked them and find out more about Duo and why the technos were after him. It was an important mission. But the shaman had a good reason to stay where he was despite that and the headaches. Svale was working on something urgent, she claimed, but as soon as she was finished, they'd look into getting Zero away from Quatre.

 

That was more important to Trowa than any discomfort.

The shaman winced as he entered the rings of stone, lines warping around him and twanging his bones like a xylophone. He shuddered and paused a moment to let the sensation fade, then he walked up to the figure sitting on one of the fallen slabs. He sat down without a word. The gentle hills rolled around them; their harmony, barely perceived through the Sanctuary's interference, soothed the shaman slightly.

"Want to talk about it?" he finally asked. It wasn't his way to dig into other people's problems unless asked, but Heero, of course, would never do that. His uninterrupted silence and foreboding scowl for the past three days had made Quatre and Svale nervous, and they'd asked Trowa to talk to him.

Quatre was sensitive to people's health, mental state and feelings, and Svale was the queen of raw cunning, but they couldn't get anything out of Heero. He ignored Svale's ploys, when he didn't react brutally. And Quatre’s empathy had never been able to feel much from Heero beyond a burning, relentless obsession for-...something. There might be feelings there, but they were buried beneath that single-minded determination like the creak of wood was drowned out by the howl of a buzz saw.

Trowa relied on other instincts. He understood Heero on a level where words were treated like tools, sharp and dangerous. He didn't need Heero to talk and talk and vent. Trowa would simply outline what he thought, and then he would listen. Heero's words often made more sense than Quatre, Svale - or Duo - had ever realized. You just needed to listen and be ready to take intuitive leaps. And not waste Heero's time with meaningless questions and chatter, or he'd just ignore you. The trick was finding out what was meaningful to Heero.

The ley stones played cats-cradle with a small breeze whispering over the mound, weaving in the call of a few birds and the yip of a fox in the distance. The silence besides him was starting to take on a personality all of its own. Well, he hadn't really expected Heero to start pouring his heart out just because Trowa had offered a sympathetic ear.

"Quatre thinks you blame him," Trowa said abruptly, cutting right to the quick, as usual.

Silence.

He glanced at Heero out of the corner of his eye. The firm profile cut itself out from a light gray sky that had liquefied the sun. Heero gave no indication he'd heard the statement.

"He's very - " Trowa was about to say worried but, on instinct, changed it to, "-hurt."

Had the scowl deepened fractionally?

"You do blame him."

Trowa was about to add something else when Heero said: "No."

The shaman felt something unclench in his chest. Good. That would have been...he didn't want to think what he'd have done if Heero had held Quatre even partly responsible for any of this mess; for attacking Fen and starting a fight that had nearly cost them dearly, or for serving as hostage while Duo escaped.

Reassured on that point, Trowa turned the next question around in his mind, carefully preparing his words as always, to say the most pared down the bare bones of what mattered. It was his nature, and it also served him well when it came to Heero.

"You were always suspicious of Duo," he finally said slowly. For some reason, Heero always responded better to affirmations than questions.

Heero's scowl became downright deadly, with a certain amount of self-directed anger.

Trowa thought about his next words, discarding the obvious questions; 'how did you know', and 'why didn't you tell us'. Heero never answered questions about how he perceived the world, he seemed to think everyone saw the same things he did. Which was probably why-

"No."

The shaman waited, then sighed internally. Great, the Heero Yuy Connect The Dots game. Well, if he continued to dig maybe another monosyllable would crop up.

Trowa leaned his elbows on his knees, chin resting on his clasped hands, and cast his mind back to their first meeting with Duo. The cabalists were right, Duo was a master at hiding himself; Trowa had felt very little suspicion about the young man. Even now. Even after all that had happened, and above all, what Duo had done to Quatre. Trowa _was_ furious, and pained when he saw the strange distance in his lover's eyes; but he found that his feeling towards Duo was the hurt of having been betrayed by a friend, not the anger at having been manipulated by an enemy. His instincts had been trying to tell him that Duo might be more than he seemed from the start. But now they were telling him that the situation might not be all that clear cut either. 

As for what Heero thought of Duo...Trowa tried to approach the question from another angle to see what Heero had to say.

"The first time he made a pass at you, I thought you were going to kill him. Er-... " Trowa gave Heero a sideways glance. "Of course maybe you were offended at the idea of a man wanting to have sex with you." Heero seemed so removed from any concept of prudishness or conventionalities, it had never occurred to him before.

"He didn't want to have sex with me," Heero said unexpectedly. "He wanted to control me."

"... How do you know?" Trowa asked carefully.

Heero gave him a long stare, apparently that that had been a very stupid question on Trowa's part. It must have been obvious to Heero. Trowa sighed and rubbed his forehead. He was getting a headache, an aftertaste of pain lingering behind his eyes. And no wonder...

"If you knew that, Heero, then why didn't you - "

A memory struck Trowa, of the conversation he'd had with Heero that day they'd met Duo by the river Reg and fought the mountain bandits. In view of what Trowa knew now it almost made him choke and he had to swallow before he could say, in a low voice: "After that first pass...Was it because I told you not to hurt Duo unless he became an immediate threat? Is that why you left him alone, even though you knew he was trying to control -"

"No."

Trowa glanced at him sharply. And for once, Heero elaborated. It was as if he was trying to explain it to himself.

"Duo tried to control me at first, but he stopped when we got here. And then he was different. He was..."

A flicker of emotion was chased by a slight look of surprise as if it had caught Heero off guard. He seemed to be searching for a word.

"What, a friend?" Trowa asked. It was meant to be sarcastic. It came out with a shiver of the hurt he was feeling instead.

Heero frowned, his eyes wandering over the heather-speckled hills as if they contained a piece of the information he was missing. 

Trowa was getting rather worried. This was like a caricature of 'his' Heero; a pitiful nervous wreck compared to the unstoppable force he usually was. Maybe he's hurting too, Trowa thought. The way Heero had attacked Duo rather contradicted that conclusion. He'd seemed so very sure then. He seemed so very confused now.

"Friend." The word was quiet, and said with concentration. It reminded Trowa of the way Heero had said 'sex' when they'd first met, when investigating what the shaman and the healer were getting up to that was so noisy.

"You don't know what the word means, do you," Trowa said resignedly. Heero’s entire knowledge seemed to begin and end with weapons. The amount he didn’t know was absolutely staggering. When Heero stumbled across a notion that was new to him, he'd repeat the word he associated with it, as if he were educating himself. This didn't happen often. He didn't seem interested in seeking knowledge outside of anything that could help him fight better. Weapons held his attention effortlessly. Human relations and emotions only intrigued him when he had his nose rubbed in them.

But better correct the misapprehension.

"Heero," Trowa said firmly. "Duo may have acted friendly, but he is not a friend. He's -..." Trowa found himself reluctant to classify Duo as an enemy. He wasn't sure how Heero would react to Duo next time he saw him. Trowa wasn't sure how he'd react himself, but he wanted room to maneuverer. He... oh, he didn't want to think about that. Not with his head pounding. He'd ask Quatre to apply a little healing spell when he finished this - for the lack of better term - conversation.

"Is that what's bothering you?" Trowa continued his questioning, dodging the awkward tangle of Duo's allegiances. "That he was acting like a friend while trying to manipulate us?"

Once more, an emotion and a hint of uncertainty flickered across Heero's face.

"He didn't beat me, Trowa... but he won," Heero finally said; his voice was as close to a question, to communication, as it had ever been, and Trowa felt that that was as much a defeat as the concession.

"I'd call it a draw myself," Trowa hazarded. That didn't seem to satisfy Heero. Come to think of it, Duo had gotten off scot-free after possessing Quatre, nearly killing Trowa, certainly killing old Fen. No, it hadn't been a draw, Duo had never had any intention of fighting Heero in the first place. And he'd gotten away with it. He'd beaten them all and he hadn't even thrown a punch himself.

Apparently this wasn't something that fit into Heero's view of the world.

Quatre had told Trowa what Duo had said before disappearing. Trowa was clinging to it, since it gave him the hope that this powerful unknown entity was in fact on their side, or to be more exact, not entirely an enemy. That was about as close as he'd let Duo get right now, he thought grimly, and Quatre probably felt the same way. But however mad he was at Shinigami - Shi No Kami, according to Svale and Heero - there was one point he had to concede.

"Duo was right about one thing, Heero. Brute strength isn't enough to win a confrontation." If pure power were the only determining factor, there'd be no point trying to fight Jusan at all; he was the toughest son of a bitch in the galaxy. Actually they were probably all walking corpses anyway, whatever Duo said, but that was beside the point. They still had a chance, and a few months to prepare. Heero was an integral part of this preparation. "Even the deadliest fighter can't win if the opponent circumvents him, or manages to subdue him by other means. It's not just Duo. Remember Fen?"

Trowa really didn't like doing this. As far as he could tell, fighting was Heero's life. More than that. It was his reason for being. His existence seemed geared around the drive to become the best warrior there was. The best weapon, Trowa thought, and frowned at the strangeness of that notion. It made him uneasy.

Heero was scowling even more.

"I would have killed Fen," he said abruptly. "I was stronger."

"Yes, and he knew that so he took you out of the equation before you could use your strength." Trowa rubbed the back of his neck, trying to relieve the pain.

Heero stood abruptly, took two steps away from the stone, arms crossed, glaring at the countryside as if it were to blame for the basic deviousness of life.

"I will get stronger," he muttered. Trowa closed his eyes wearily. I've lost this round, he thought, too monopolized by pain to truly care. Still, Trowa was ready to bet that between Fen, Duo and himself, seeds had been planted that would crack the concrete blinders around Heero's vision of the world. Now...was this a good thing?

"Quatre will get stronger too. Whatever the cost," Heero said firmly, and turned to walk away from the shaman.

Trowa shot to his feet, eyes blazing, mouth open in a shout of denial-

\- which turned into a gasp of blood-red pain.

Something jarred him. The ground. He'd fallen to his knees. From a very long distance away he felt his hands gripping his face, and in his narrowing vision he saw Heero look down at him in surprise. Heero's face was warping as if Trowa was being encased in ice, the air in the circle of stone freezing around him. A vibration started. Slowly, like a heartbeat deep beneath them, where the Sanctuary met the source, pulsing through the entire hill. The pace was increasing with slow finality. The helpless shaman knew that when the beat reached its screaming peak the ice around him would shatter into a million particles, shredding him to pieces.

Then suddenly it eased.

The feeling of being caught in ice ebbed and left him thrashing around weakly. He felt arms around him and clung like a drowning man, and the scent of the rough cotton cloth was so familiar he thought he was going to cry with relief. The agony receded, the insanity of that pulse ripping through his mind abated, and he was in a calm oasis and in Quatre's arms.

"Shhh. It's going to be alright." Quatre's voice tried to be soothing, but it was pitched a lot higher than usual and was trembling with effort. Trowa's mind swam back to reality, wincing as he could still feel the wringing of lines around them beyond the sphere of protection Quatre had woven.

"It'll be over soon."

"Hn!" Heero's grunt was pained. Trowa cracked his eyes open, expecting a blinding pain, but finding only mild discomfort. Heero was kneeling next to Quatre, his hands over his ears for all the good that would do, looking around him bewildered. Even a non-mage, assuming that was what Heero was, could feel the magical riot going on around them.

"What's going on?" Trowa asked, stunned.

"Svale! She's casting a spell with the- Uh oh, hang on." Quatre winced and gripped Trowa tighter.

The shaman tried to tell Quatre not to take any risks; he could feel the way the blonde was pushing away the lines that were trying to strangle them, and he knew only one way he could be doing that. Zero. He didn't want Quatre to push himself too far, to kill himself to save Trowa.

His words were drowned by the sudden spiraling increase of the vibration and the world dissolved into a swirl of motion which ended in one, gigantic pulse. Even Quatre shouted and was thrown to the ground by the massive release of mystical energy that rippled from the Sanctuary, making it ring like a gong, before disappearing like a tidal wave ripping across the land towards the horizon.

And then silence fell again.

 

\---

 

Imp was a simple creature. It had been created from stone, mud and blood; these humble origins weren't the makings of a great philosopher.

Imp liked to eat. The electrolytes in blood kept Imp's silicate portions healthy; the organic elements were unnecessary to imp in theory, but it still thought they were yummy and besides, it gave the fluid a distinctive, _individual_ flavor.

Imp also liked to sleep. It was detached from its worries then and left to connect with the deep, deep dreams of the earth, its mother.

Imp loved its father too, its master Duo. Though that love was being tested after three days without food, and its master's constant pacing interrupting Imp's morning nap.

Imp sighed, a little whistling sound, and poked its head out of the bedroll. It did love its master. It didn't have to; the spell that created it only enforced obedience. And a casual observer would say Imp's master didn't always treat it kindly - but that would be ignorance speaking. It was actually impossible to hurt a rock. So as long as Duo fed it and let it sleep, there was actually little the man could do to be cruel to it. Imp loved Duo because Duo was nice to it and talked to it, once it'd learned to avoid showing too much kindness and love towards its master when he was in one of his moods. As Duo had said, it brought out his worst side, reminding him of what was forever beyond his reach; the pain bringing out Shi No Kami. Imp knew that for all its love and devotion, it couldn't replace what had been lost. But still Duo treated Imp like it was a creature in its own right, an ally and a friend.

Duo reached one end of the gulley that held them and the mountain spring captive. The figure, once more clad in his disguise of worn black leathers, turned sharply on his heels, braid flying, and walked the eleven steps - that number was beginning to burn into Imp's simple inorganic brain - back to the other side of the cleft in the ravine. Duo's face was a parody of his usual relaxed grin, a one-sided smile that was crueler than a serrated knife. This did not surprise Imp, he'd seen this side of his master before, but it would surprise anyone on Center who knew Duo Maxwell the waif, or the jester, or the small-time crook or any other guise he'd worn. A few humans had seen this side of Duo, but none had cared to discuss the chilling effects with Imp. In fact, none of them had survived that apparition for more than a minute. No one knew of this Duo Maxwell, because he left only corpses in his wake.

Probably Duo was edgy because he had run out of things to do, Imp thought. The first days after the plan had taken a bit of a blow, Duo had run around salvaging what he could. He'd made sure that he couldn't be backtracked to their hideout and that the others would not be able to find out more about him; insuring that all the leads to him were dead, or at least terrorized into silence. Then Duo and Imp had looked into the origins of the healer who had unexpectedly incorporated Zero. It proved difficult, Quatre had moved around a lot during his young life, going to whatever clinic his order sent him to. After considerable backtracking they had discovered he was the scion of desert dwelling folk, who were reputed for their skills at mathematics, geometry, astronomy, strategy and chess. Even Imp had been a bit scared by the look on Duo's face at that point. Duo had spent a few minutes banging his head against the wall before porting Imp to Howard's ship to warn the old man to get the hell out of there on any excuse, before Quatre started tinkering with Zero and looked at Howard a bit too closely. Imp knew that Howard would be needed later, but he would have to stay away until things had progressed to the point it would no longer matter if the healer discovered the technologist had been working with Shi No Kami all this time.

Duo had slept for almost twenty four hours after that, exhausted by the past few months, the efforts at dodging Heero without showing up on any enemy radars, and with the hustle to shore up what he could of the plan. Imp had been grateful to see its master getting some rest and had curled up by his side for a nice long nap. But it looked like rest time was over.

"Master, maybe we should sort through your things again and see if anything can help us?" Imp suggested brightly. One of Imp's other simple pleasures was going through Duo's collection of treasures like a chuckling magpie. It didn't know what most of the shiny magical things did, but it liked them, and it knew Duo could sometimes find new uses for them if he thought about it.

"Shut up," Duo muttered as he turned at the wall and continued to pace to the other side.

Imp sighed again and shrugged. It had been worth a try. Maybe-

"Shut up."

Imp blinked and opened its mouth to point out it hadn't said anything. But being simple didn't make it dumb and it caught itself in time. What was Duo -

"Shut up shut up shut up shut up!"

Imp's little mouth hung open, but it didn't notice. Uh ho...

" **Fool!** " The word - the old tongue of power warping weird vowels out of the ringing echoes in the gulley - burst from Duo and made him stagger before his quick pacing resumed. His worn leathers twitched and jerked, shaping into buckles here and there, tightening slowly. "Hn. Shut up," Duo added.

Imp fluttered nervously from the blanket and perched on a saddlebag. "Master?" it whispered.

"Shut the fuck up. **Hah!**! No, the plan is still-kk!" Duo nearly slammed into the rock face.

He stood still for a few seconds, head sunk into his arms against the cold stone of the ravine. The leathers swirled, curling around his body like formless silk, shaping up again into something harder, smoother, and dark as murder. Imp took a fluttering hop nearer, then back to the saddlebag again, wondering what to say. And knowing that Duo would probably not be able to hear it anyway.

"It will- Damn it! Six years! I-!"

Duo straightened away from the rock in a violent movement, spinning, energy sparking from the rippling darkness cloaking him, his hair crackling with mana. Eyes wide and angry.

"You have no right," Duo snarled, glaring at the rocks around him. "You have no right! I've done everything I could, I- _aah!_ " He flinched then snarled and straightened again.

"Fuck. You." Energy started to swirl and imp whimpered a protest. "You heard me! I've plotted and planned and lied and - and killed and you, you died - _you left me all alone!_ "

The scream ripped through air and rock, cracking boulders and making dust and debris dance in the ravine. Imp gripped the saddlebag and furled in its wings, helpless to stop the explosion.

"You bastards! I've set it all up! It will work or nothing will! I did what I can and you - are - _dead!_ " The smooth black material covering him juddered once, and small spikes began to curl up and harden like claws along his arms and back.

"You no longer have the right to - shut up! No! I couldn't- What good would that do?! Huh?! Are you insane?! I _won't!_ If I harmed them, what would that accomplish - Oh that's just great, that's real smart! I can't _force_ them to fight! Well, him I can, but _he_ doesn't have Wing and - no! Wing is Heero's, and I can't get it off of him - Just leave me the fuck alone! All on me, it's been all on me! I'm - _aaaahh!_ "

Imp flinched as its master screamed in fury and agony, glaring at the sky above them, lost in the tumult in his mind. It wanted to go to Duo, it wanted to do something. But Duo had warned it before that it was too dangerous to interfere with him in these cases. Stone and bone, imp thought bitterly. It hadn't been this bad in years. Everything had been going well. More than well. In fact Duo had accomplished minor miracles to get this far. Why was it so bad? The plan was already in motion. Just because Duo's role had been discovered, nothing was going to change this late in the game.

Imp suspected that the voices in Duo's head had detected a weakness, and they were notorious for coming down strongly on that. 'If I harmed them', Duo had said. Was that it? 'Them'? Was it because, for the first time in six years of manipulating animals who were only trying to use him in turn, Duo had stumbled upon people who had accepted him at face value? Who had asked nothing of him? Had tried to befriend him? Imp has seen its master's eyes dim when he'd been forced to attach the Mark on the healer. It had flinched from Duo's face, rigid with anger and pain, when he'd come back from a fight with Heero to tell Imp that the plan would now have to manage on its own or not at all, as he could no longer go near his former companions without being attacked. And now Duo was alone again. Imp wondered if its master missed the others. He shouldn't. His kind shouldn't miss humans, shouldn't need them; it was a weakness. But after six years of solitude...Was that why the voices were so much crueler than usual?

Duo had staggered and fallen to his knees in the middle of the ravine. He was clutching his bare forearms, and the armored gloves had pierced the skin, sending little tears of blood cascading down the pale flesh. Imp whimpered, though it knew that the pain was necessary to its master, the only way Duo could anchor what was left of his mind to his body. And perhaps expiate his sin as well, the sin of his survival. He was snarling in the old tongue, words biting and curtailing each other so quickly Imp could no longer follow the argument. But Imp overheard a few whimpers in a voice he knew - though not Duo Maxwell’s voice. This was the voice of a child...

"Solo...help me...make them see...did all I could....Solo...please don't leave me, I can't, I can't be alone, I- _What the-_ "

Duo suddenly flinched and tensed, head coming up like a hound scenting the wind. His eyes were focused and as hard as his mother's bones, as the saying went. Imp trembled, wondering what was coming.

Duo opened his mouth, eyes widening. Then he put his hands over his ears, smearing blood on his face. His spirit shield slammed into place. Imp instinctively gripped the saddlebag again.

Then the sound came.

The cry of the phoenix was a mere bird's chirp next to this noise. Not so much sound as pressure, as if the planet were inside a huge bell. What felt like a single huge tremor ran through the crust of the earth, rippling past them faster than the speed of sound, but incredibly leaving no damage behind it, apart from a nasty sympathetic ring in Imp's stones that made it topple off the saddlebag with a weak 'gah!'

When it scrabbled up, Duo was still in the same position, kneeling with his bloodied hands over his ears, eyes focused on something Imp could not see. When he spoke, it was not the voice of a lost child, or of the cruel choir, or of the solitary young man crushed by what he had to do; it was the voice of Shi No Kami who had accepted his fate with a disturbing laugh and a smirk, formulated the plan, and killed hundreds without hesitation or remorse to put it in motion.

"Well, well, well, looks like that lecherous old lady managed to get it right. You guys can go back to being dead now." Duo's voice cut like diamonds. "End game has begun and I don't need your whining and carrying on to compromise it. The dice are cast. Let's see what Juusan does now."

Duo licked the blood off a finger casually, then laughed. It was a sound that made even Imp go cold.

"Well, of course the Scourge might send a herald. In fact I'm rather counting on it! I have that covered, I have it all covered now. Or at least I'd better! Or we're all well and truly fucked and the galaxy with us. Hmmm. The next few months are gonna be fun."

Duo stood up slowly, eyes on the sky where the grey clouds were roiling from the shaking of the earth below them. "Fun," he whispered and the smile flickered. "Though maybe not for Heero and the others. I hope...too late for that, I suppose. Unless...it depends on the Scourge’s reaction now. Come on, Imp! We've got a lot to do and little time to do it in."

"What are we going to do, master?" Imp asked as it fluttered over to Duo's shoulder, flying in unsteady zigzags as it tried to get its stones to stop vibrating. It avoided the areas where Duo's outfit was repairing his minor self-inflicted injuries, finally settling on Duo's shoulder.

"Do? We're going to check one last time that everything is ready, all the players in place, all systems go, and then I'm gonna get drunk for a week. I should imagine that's all the time I'll have."

\---

Wufei ignored the men he passed as he walked towards Jusan's quarters. He'd dismissed them days ago as carrion, cheap mercenaries beneath contempt. They parted fearfully before him.

He gave a minimal nod to two Dragons guarding the door to the systems' room. They returned full salutes. Wufei sighed internally. These were the lowest caste of Dragons, and they were simple men; they didn't understand the politics of alliance and allegiance and the fact that Wufei wasn't yet their war leader. For them the deal was done already, and they were obviously relieved. Wufei was solitary by nature, and this clinging to him was annoying, even though he tried to accept it gracefully. In his mind a man shouldn't depend on others for his pride, for his reason to live, fight and die. He should find his own. Wufei had. Its name was Wing.

He sipped his coffee abruptly, ignoring the way it scalded his tongue. The thought had triggered a memory. He'd had that dream again. In that dream, Wing was not the purpose, but only a means to an end, leading to something so important, so urgent, that it burned his very soul...but he'd lost it, it was cloaked in darkness and the memory of pain. The dream made him writhe in shame; the loss had driven him to his knees, and his weakness and his grief were put on open display. And then the ultimate insult, an offer of comfort. In his dream he'd clung to that gentle hand like a pathetic-... forget it, probably just the remains of his conscience torturing him about his decision to join Jusan. He was due the occasional nightmare, considering his circumstances.

He wasn't in the best of moods as he opened the doors to Jusan's sanctum without knocking. He didn't see why he should waste his time signaling his presence. Jusan knew the position of every person on this ship, particularly someone as strong as Wufei, and if the Scourge didn't want to be disturbed, a gravity bomb wouldn't get that door open. Still, for some reason the absence of this useless little courtesy annoyed Jusan. Wufei considered that a bonus.

"And good morning to you too," Jusan said sardonically. He'd probably sensed Wufei's mood from hundreds of feet away. The tall figure was sitting in his chair - where he had probably materialized shortly before Wufei opened the door - obviously waiting for his obstreperous guest.

Wufei grunted and looked around absently. A small tray materialized two feet away from him at chest height, floating in mid-air. The dragon gave it a distasteful look, but placed his cup on it without comment. He jerked the buttons on the side of his tunic.

"What are we doing today?" he asked without wasting his time on small talk.

Jusan stood and made a show of thinking, a long finger tapping the thin lips. Wufei wondered, not for the first time, why the creature bothered with all these little mannerisms. The Scourge had been among humans too long.

"I'll continue to stimulate the growth of the nano-morphs on the chest plate, then we'll have a look at its energy levels," Jusan finally declared.

"When are you going to repair the CPU?" Wufei asked tightly. He missed having his little beam of information twinkling in his eye.

"I'll save that for last, once autonomous functions are restored. Otherwise I might miss a connection between the parts' processes and the headpiece, and you'd find yourself unable to fully integrate them without having to do a whole lot of resetting and recalibrating."

"Very well," Wufei grumbled. He had the tunic off now, tied carelessly around his waist; a thought sent Shenlong stretching and dancing across his chest. "How long until the chest plate is complete again?"

He glanced up at the silence. Jusan was a few feet away, face blank, staring at a point a few inches to Wufei's left. The expression on the patrician features was so unusual that the Dragon glanced over his shoulder with some alarm to see what was there.

The chair, tray and Jusan dematerialized with a whoosh that buffeted Wufei and sent papers flying across the room. The crash of the coffee cup smashing on the floor was the only physical sound, but the mental roar nearly knocked the Dragon unconscious.

// THEY DARE!!//

Wufei groaned as Jusan's presence swamped him, burst from the sanctum and burned in the psyche of everyone on Libra.

//Those little worms! Those apes! They dare to oppose me?! They dare to deny me from what is mine?! They think this will stop me?! If it's war they want, they'll get it!//

The mental turmoil died down. Wufei gasped. He'd fallen to his knees with his hands over his head in an instinctive gesture of defense. He glanced up. Jusan had materialized again and was glaring at him.

"Stand up, Dragon. We have work to do. I may be several months away from Center and whatever pitiful little plots are hatching there, but you aren't. I hope you rested well last night, you will not have many hours of sleep until you get onto that shuttle and go and see exactly what the hell they think they're doing on that mudball."

"Fine by me," Wufei said carefully, standing and continuing to deploy Shenlong. He didn't ask Jusan to explain, he knew he'd be told what his soon-to-be liege and employer wanted him to do once he got to Center.

He squirreled away in the back of his mind a little wisp of thought. That moment when Jusan had lost it - and that was a millennium-defining event right there - Wufei had been nearly crushed by the anger pouring from the Scourge. He was ready to bet the ship was now littered with whimpering crewmen who'd be in shock for hours. Wufei's mind and will were much stronger than that, even though he'd been at ground zero. Not only had he not been damaged by the display, he remembered something else about the event, a little tinge of emotion to the anger, something Jusan probably didn't want him to know about. He turned the memory over and over in the back of his mind, counting on the Scourge's distraction to shield it from him. That little speck of feeling, that drop of emotion...it was not something he recognized ever feeling from Jusan before. In fact it took him a few minutes to figure out what it had been.

A hint of fear.

Wufei glanced down at Shenlong's throbbing metal plating. He hoped Jusan would accelerate the process now. Wufei could take it. He wanted to get back to Center more than ever now.

He was getting very curious.

 

\---

 

Birds were screeching and wheeling in alarm some distance away from the Sanctuary. But within the stone perimeter there was only a deathly, ringing silence. Any creature that had not managed to bolt away from the Sanctuary was now lying on the ground, stunned. 

Svale walked in a stagger through the stone circles, occasionally slipping on a worm that had wrenched itself from the sod in panic. Her hair was fluffed and crackling as if she'd stuck her fingers in a live socket and her eyes were glazed. The leer on her face was undefeated though.

"Whoohooo! That'll clear your sinuses!!"

She was pinned down by three angry stares.

"... What?" She asked innocently.

 

\---

 

Next Chapter: Resonance And Consequence

Consider those sinuses cleared. Now to deal with the rest of the side effects.


	22. Resonance And Consequence

Quatre picked up a stunned jackdaw and absently smoothed the rumpled feathers. It had been standing on the crook between two leaning stones, defending its nest against the danger it had felt but not understood. It had been knocked clean out, and all but one of the eggs in the nest was broken.

Trowa and Heero were looming over Svale like two mean bookends, glaring down at the diminutive form.

"You should have warned us, Svale," Quatre said accusingly.

Svale looked ornery for a few seconds as if she was going to try to bluff her way out of it, then she shrugged gracelessly.

"I'd have warned you if I'd seen it coming, kids. I didn't think the chain reaction would get away from me like that. It was a hell of a lot easier to trigger than I thought it'd be."

"Trigger _what_?" Trowa asked through gritted teeth.

"Um... let's go sit down and have a drink," Svale suggested, trying to pat down her static-filled hair. "I think better when my blood stabilizes at 1% alcohol."

"Very well but you're not allowed to slip into an ethylic coma until you tell us what you did," Quatre muttered. In his hand the jackdaw suddenly revived, healed, and flew away in a crash of wings that sounded terribly loud in the ringing silence around them.

\---

 

"Trowa, you and Rabbit know that this is no ordinary Jishin Sanctuary, right?" Svale declared, then looked sideways at Heero. He stared back, impassive, giving no indication that he'd ever had any thoughts on the matter. Svale shrugged and knocked back the contents of her cracked mug in one shot. Many of the mismatched dishes she'd accumulated over the years had not survived the vibrations, but fortunately for her mental stability the bottles in their boxes of straw were mostly intact.

"It's why you live here and study this one," Quatre said patiently. "You always said this was the principal one on Center."

"Yes. There are a few Jishin mounds and sanctuaries on many a planet, where the Tricksters played mischief with the local population or did whatever weird experiments they wanted. But Center was a special case, they knew the importance of this place of Sources. They created this sanctuary particularly for Center, and its unique design has always intrigued me. Normally Jishin places are covered, secret. This one has a partially open design and it's huge compared to others. It also has a complex connection to a really old and powerful Source far beneath it. No one knew what it was for, it's been abandoned for centuries. The other wardens supposed it was used as a portal to Imanohone, same as other Sanctuaries. I always felt there was more. I recently found... evidence that suggested - or rather confirmed my suspicions - as to what that 'more' is. Damn is this bottle finished already?"

“Svale, finish explaining before you get completely pissed," Trowa said darkly as he stopped her from getting another jug of moonshine.

"Oh all right. Anyway, to cut a long story short...The Jishin were always wary of Center and its Sources. They were smart enough to recognize a power greater than their own and be suspicious of it. They studied this planet for a long time, in fact for a while Center was almost a second home to them, as they explored and connected to the planet in a way only that race of creatures close to stone and earth could. This Sanctuary is the result.

"They wanted a method of restricting the sheer raw power that could come out of Center - and defend it against anything that might seek to attack and control it from outside. They made Center ready for battle. The fairy mounds on this planet are bunkers. The Elsire trees in the sacred groves were sentinel watches. And this Sanctuary is the guardian node that connects them all with Center, and it's the powerhouse of their defense.

"This Sanctuary's stones and leylines act as an amplifier for the power of the Source below. Each Source has its own character, its own expression of its power - that's why they tend to produce different kind of Gods; aggressive, benevolent, destructive, creative... This is what you could call a defensive Source. That's why it feels practically inactive, and doesn't have a god. The power it generates expresses itself in the form of defensive magic, closing it off to the outside."

"The sanctuary is casting a shield spell, powered by the Source?" Quatre asked abruptly. "It was made to defend the Jishin here, so that they could have a fortress to fall back on if something really ugly crawled out of a Source."

"Yes and no, Rabbit." Svale's eyes looked distant. "That's what I always thought, but the shape seemed so... grand for just that purpose. And the Sanctuary seemed so keen to drag and collect leylines to it... Then I... er, had a moment of insight a few days ago. The Sanctuary isn't what is supposed to cast the spell. It's a transmitter that will pass the spell on to the planet's magnetic field so the -"

"The whole planet resonates with the spell!" Quatre gasped, surging to his feet staring at the old crone.

"You got it, kiddo. Can I go have a drink now?" Svale looked at the box full of lethal liquor longingly.

"Wait a minute," Trowa said firmly. "The spell or whatever the sanctuary cast only lasted a second. Though I grant you it feels like it went right around the planet," he added. His bones were still aching, and, through the Sanctuary's usual interference, he could feel strange echoes run up and down Center's leylines. Something pretty massive had happened. Massive, but very brief.

"Yeah, I'm still looking into that part," Svale said, and Trowa, who knew her well, realized she looked worried. "I didn't want to have this test get out of hand today, actually. The whole planet rang like a fucking gong. You can't hide this amount of power, however briefly it lasted."

"This will have been a warning shot to the enemy,” Heero said unexpectedly. His eyes were focused inward and he ignored the startled looks of his companions.

"He don't say much, but when he talks he occasionally makes sense." Svale grunted, absently reaching out to grope Heero's thigh. A hand like a steel vice caught hers and put it back on the table with a smash that left imprints in the grain.

"Jusan? This shield could stop the Scourge?" Trowa asked softly.

"Yes." Svale rubbed her wrist with a grimace. "Shield is actually not the right word, kiddos. This spell is a fucking mind-job for mages. It eats power and accumulates it. So the harder you punch it, the stronger it gets. It also acts as a power dampener in its containment area - which is the whole bloody planet - so the more power you have, the more it will reduce it to -"

"It will remove Jusan's power when he's on Center?" Trowa said, hardly daring to believe it.

"I wish. It _will_ slow him down. How much remains to be seen. Only a Jishin could really tell us that, and he wiped them out. He knew he might be in a position of weakness coming back here, maybe it was a preemptive strike. I don't know if the Jishin would have opposed him, they were getting pretty detached from the affairs of the Galaxy, but the Scourge isn't known to leave anything that could even resemble an enemy alive."

"This could give us a chance," Trowa murmured. Besides him, Heero nodded thoughtfully.

"That's the idea! But for it to work we need to figure out how to get the planet resonating with the spell for good. And then we can batten down hatches and get ready for some real fun and games."

"What do you mean?" Quatre asked sharply.

"The reason the Jishin didn't just turn on their shield and leave it on and forget about it is because it has... side-effects," Svale said morosely.

Trowa and Quatre stared a her, at the tremble of danger in the air, and were almost afraid to ask.

"You see, the resonance shields the planet from outside attack - which is nice 'cause it means Jusan can't just wipe out all form of life from Great Wyrms to earthworms with a flick of his fingers. It also dampens magic within. But the way it works, the resonance is going to cause a lot of havoc to reality inside the shield. Mages are going to find their magic becoming both reduced and volatile. And our society relies a lot on the arcane. I’m not sure how technology will be affected, but I doubt Center will be any kinder to it, so it’s not going to be able to pick up the slack. Which will be problem, because this kind of magical mayhem will trigger Sources far and wide. The Gods might not like the effects, and you know how temperamental they can get...”

"It sounds like Armageddon, not salvation, Svale," Trowa said tightly.

"It will make life very interesting, but at least we'll be here to enjoy it." Svale pointed out gnomically. "You prefer Jusan's option? Once he's rejuvenated, he won't even spare the bacteria."

"Can we turn this shield off after we put it on?" Quatre eyed Svale suspiciously.

"Erm... that's open to debate." Svale managed to dodge them all and grab a bottle from the box.

"Wonderful," Quatre sighed, and Trowa nodded.

Besides them, Heero was scowling at something only he could see.

 

\---

 

The room throbbed with restrained power. The boy was hanging in midair, nearly naked, eyes closed in concentration, sweat trickling down taut muscles, his mind pooled and almost entirely closed in on itself in an effort to keep a mental grip on his growing armor.

The creature known to the bags of mortal meat around it as Juusan stretched out a tendril of thought and brushed away a few shivers of pain and stress from the mind before him. It was an idle gesture, like a man picking lint from his cuff. Though the repairs were complex, it didn't require all his concentration. Nothing ever did.

While parts of his intellect maintained his physical body - every atom, molecule, cell, vessel and organ functioning correctly - and another part made sure the ship and its crew followed his orders, part of his mind concentrated on Shenlong. And part of him was free to speculate. What would he do once Wufei became his war leader, and took back the direction of his race? The Dragons were useful, even in their reduced state. But would he allow them to make more armor?

Had the Dragons he'd destroyed even realized the potential of what they'd created? Probably not. But one day they might. To an immortal creature, one day or one century or millennia was all the same. The instant the Dragons had developed Wing, and he'd seen that they were capable of it, he'd destroyed them. Because of Wing... and of the armors and the warriors who would surely follow, today, tomorrow, next century, one day, and all in Juusan's time-span. It had been as immediate a threat as a direct attack. Too bad the Dragons had not realized it... A small part of Juusan hovered over Wufei's mind, watching the ripples of thought and feeling beneath the steel-like concentration. The boy still hated him. He would always hate him. That was inevitable. Oh well... Wufei's hate was always a hundred times more interesting than the fawning adoration of some of the other sycophants who had commanded Juusan's forces yesterday, last year, last century, once upon a time...

Juusan concentrated on a nexus node in the armor. Gundanium... the metal, extraordinarily rare and so difficult to refine and use, had the most wonderful properties, which only a race of mechanists like the Dragons could have fully appreciated. Each atom by itself was just an ordinary metal. Join two particles together and they triggered each other's energy levels, in a way that resembled radioactive disintegration but was far more useful and less harmful... to those who harnessed the reaction, that is. It was a minute speck of energy, but the reaction amplified with each additional atom. What was really interesting was the way the energy generated this way could harmonize with the human psyche.

That was where the Dragon armor had crossed a dangerous boundary in Juusan's eyes.

Juusan could feel it here and now. To dominate his growing armor, Wufei was using a mental program like meditation that bordered on the mage trance. Of course Dragons despised the arcane so they hadn't realized this was the direction they were heading. Most of their armor and their men did not have the refined abilities to do more than make sure the metal and its mechanical components meshed properly. But the High Dragons and their armor...

Wufei's mind and his body's energy were triggering and controlling the chain reaction rippling around him as the gundanium expanded. Although the armor looked like solid metal, in fact it was only the thinnest crust of gundanium over a mix of carbon and energy pockets, making the whole thing tough and more cohesive than any metal had any right to be. And that was just the start. The waves of energy, controlled by Wufei's considerable willpower, danced in Juusan's vision of the world. The real armor, invisible to the mortal eye, cloaked the boy from head to toe, or would once the armor's gundanium particles were re-energized to their appropriate levels of excitement. Shenlong sang in the boy's mind, helping him control and express his mental powers, and Wufei's will boosted the armor's energy and fields, refining his control. It was a cycle that, theoretically, might never end.

Mechanized magic. The unfettered will of the human mind assisted by the power of a nearly sentient machine.

Dangerous boundaries indeed...

Juusan's power touched the boy. It would be so easy. A flick, a thought, and this strange mortal who had never been afraid of him would be dead, and the danger his harmony with his all-too-intelligent machine would no longer be... what, a threat? Wufei wasn't a threat. But his descendants might be. A threat to Juusan and above all to his task, his sacred duty.

If they were to be a threat, then he'd cull the descendants when the time came, he decided. Juusan didn't deal with individuals. For one living in the timelessness of immortality, entire races were what he considered to be his peers, if far beneath him. Yet for all that, he didn't want to kill the boy, not unless he had to. It was important to keep Wufei around. It reminded Juusan that he could destroy humans, but he could never entirely control them, or disregard them, or even understand them. They were so fragile, yet they had depths that he could never fathom, a strength that was puny compared to his, yet refused to admit it. A will to fight, to survive for just a short handful of years more, and then to reach for what immortality they could, through their genes or their actions. That frantic effort he could never understand, never share, left Juusan baffled... and ever so slightly envious.

He was the shepherd. He dealt with entire herds, leading them to green pastures or culling them if necessary.

He smoothed another ribbon of pain from Wufei's stressed mind - the boy was making almost inhumane efforts to keep up with the pace Juusan had set for the repairs. Even he was impressed.

He was the shepherd and his charges were many, but he allowed himself to keep the occasional lamb as a pet.

A smile flickered across Juusan's materialized features. He couldn't grasp much about how individual humans thought, for all that he could rip out their thoughts and read them like a book, but he knew enough to know that he should never, ever, ever refer to Wufei like that to the boy's face. Oh dear, no.

He teased a few more gundanium particles with his mind. He was restoring their energy levels, in essence irradiating them using magic turned into chemistry - another boundary, but as the shepherd and the one who'd set the lines in the first place, he did not worry about crossing them himself. Once the gundanium was restored in each section, the more mechanical parts of the armor could be repaired. Shenlong was still a machine, it had mechanisms and programs to help its owner control it and assist him in battle. Juusan was looking forward to repairing those parts. He loved technology, precisely because it was so alien to him. But first the gundanium that linked and powered the armor's mechanisms had to be restored. It was a slow process. Not for Juusan who could re-energize a ton of gundanium with a twitch of his mental fingers, but he had to go slowly to allow Wufei to keep up, integrate each newly energized particle into the whole, so that the Dragon could control and manage the chain reaction, merge it with his thought patterns. It was a huge mental effort, and the stress would have already exhausted a lesser creature. Juusan petted away a few more quivers of pain and then pulled his mind back from Shenlong and let the boy down. Wufei staggered and went to lean against the wall, but his glare was indomitable.

"Why did we stop?"

Because you need a rest, you stubborn-... "I need to think about the configuration of the left wrist guard. I'm not familiar with this design."

Wufei grunted. "It was broken a year ago." In the confrontation between Wufei and Juusan's troops, or perhaps when the boy attacked Juusan himself. Neither of them commented. "I cobbled it together with the parts from another mecha and rewrote the program to integrate the two."

Juusan was impressed. "Did you now? By yourself?"

"Yes."

"Then we will look at this together once I've restored the gundanium, and we'll see how you want the mechanism repaired," Juusan said, and let a mental hand linger in the pleasurable tingle of Wufei's sudden relief at being given a part in the repairs, a speck of control.

He materialized a chair for the boy, and thought it a good sign of their improved relations when Wufei sat down with a tired grunt. Juusan's muscles were powered by a will that could destroy planets, but he'd picked up a lot of human habits in the eons of his stewardship and so he accompanied the boy and took his own seat. He watched clinically as a bead of sweat trickled down Wufei's chest, noted the slight slump to his shoulders, and decided it was time to start chipping away at the boy's stubbornness again.

"You'll be able to rest tomorrow, and the day after I think. I will have other work to do."

Wufei's eyes widened though they stayed fixed on the floor. It was obvious he wanted to shout and protest, but he knew where Juusan was coming from... and leading to.

"Such a pity you refused my offer to become my herald, Wufei." Juusan had never mastered the art of subtlety.

Black eyes slowly rose to pin Juusan with a glare. The creature thrummed a bit in the heat of Wufei's anger, though he noted the slight lessening of the intensity, the beginning of a crumble in the stone-hard front.

"It puzzles me. As my war leader, you would almost be expected to do this."

" ...not your war leader yet... " Wufei muttered in reply, but his shoulders were slumped in fatigue. Really, Juusan thought, he should ease up on the boy. Humans were so fragile.

"And when you are? Will you accept to be my herald then?"

The slightest flinch across the lean frame. Juusan sighed internally.

This very resistance was what made Wufei so strange, so foreign and yet interesting to the Scourge. Lesser men would fear becoming his herald because there was always a possibility it would destroy them. But Wufei's strength of mind and will were great enough where the risks would not be considerable. Yet those very qualities were what was making him refuse; what a conundrum. Like the boy himself, really.

"I don't...I will not give my will over to you, Jusan," Wufei ground out. Did he sound a bit less positive? A touch less angry?

"I know you fear the risks-" Juusan didn't know much about humans, but he knew some of Wufei's buttons.

"Blow the risks! I won't let you make me your puppet!" Wufei snarled, surging to his feet, fists bunched and body rigid.

"My herald, Wufei. My voice, my fist, the bearer of my power-"

"I'd be an empty husk and you'd be using me!"

"No, you'd still have all your mind and senses," Juusan corrected, not bothering to point out that they would be a hiccup in a hurricane.

"But they'd be under your control!" Wufei snarled.

"Your opponent on Center might be stronger than you. He wears Wing-"

"I'll defeat him!"

"Yes, but-"

"Without your help!"

Juusan steepled his fingers, staring at the young man burning before him like a flame, darkness and fire, anger and passion. He didn't doubt for an instant that Wufei would defeat this Heero or die trying, if he could do so unopposed.

"But what of this man's allies?" he asked smoothly. "The ones who are trying to cast this shield, and protect themselves against me? They might have other tricks up their sleeves. Treacherous little vermin that they are. Wouldn't it be a pity if you succumbed to some backstabbing little spell without even getting near this Heero?"

Wufei snarled and spun around, kicking some curio near his feet. A tiny fraction of Juusan's mind caught the object, repaired it and returned it to its place.

"We could always compromise," The Scourge murmured.

A glance from the corner of almond-shaped eyes, quick, reluctant.

"We could send you down there with a patched-up Shenlong and let you try to defeat this Heero, but you would have the herald's link to me, and I could be at your side in a heartbeat, at the slightest call- " he'd nearly said 'for help' but caught the warning ripples in the familiar mind and instead said: "- for backup against any pernicious sorcery they throw at you."

Wufei's lip curled. He could probably feel Juusan manipulating him. He'd been with the Scourge for five years or so and his kind learned fast (when you only lived a scant century or so, you certainly had to learn fast before it all ended, poor creatures). But the truth of the matter remained: Juusan needed a herald on Center as quickly as possible. That shield nonsense they were trying to cast wouldn't do much more than slow him down, of course, he wasn't particularly worried about it. But it was an annoyance, an insult really. He wanted a herald down there as soon as possible before it was finished and cast. He thought he had a couple of week's leeway before that happened.

A herald had to be strong to stand the might of Juusan's power and mind using him as a channel, a conduit to act directly on the planet he was still several months away from reaching. Most men would be destroyed with only a fraction of Juusan's power, and would be useless to him. But a strong body and mind like Wufei would be able to stand a considerable portion of Juusan's power and remain intact. Mostly. Juusan had absolutely no intention of harming the boy if he could possibly help it, but there was always a risk.

"If you can defeat that usurper of your race's armor by yourself, I will be the first to applaud you, Wufei," Juusan murmured and meant it. If there were no real danger down there, if those plotting wretches were just playing with forces beyond them with no comprehension, as was likely, then he did not want to take risks with the boy's mind, the delightful, intriguing mix of anger, pride, arrogance and intelligence, sprinkled with vulnerabilities like a tangy dash of spices...no he wouldn't want Wufei to summon him unless things got out of hand.

But if Wufei did summon him...then the Scourge would kill everything that moved on that planet and quite a lot that didn't. Juusan didn't take lightly to being opposed in any shape or form by anything that might have the slightest ability to actually hurt him. His task was too important for that.

The boy was shaking his head, but Juusan could feel the slight lessening of resistance, the faint horror at the sense of his own defeat. Wufei would know that if he refused, Juusan would stop repairing Shenlong to go and try to prepare some other miserable minion to be his herald, which would demand considerable work. He'd not have time to spend on Wufei's armor until the matter was resolved. And someone else would go to Center before the Dragon did. Someone else would kill this Heero, with Juusan's power at his command there would be no doubt. Someone else would touch Wing before Wufei did.

Juusan's mind curled in a smile. He could force millions to obey his will, obliterate armies... but manipulating a single stubborn Dragon was much more challenging and many times more entertaining. When his herald returned to him, after destroying their enemies on Center, he'd let him have Wing, and the boy would be his war leader, and hopefully keep him challenged and entertained for as many years as the mortal pet had left to live.

 

\---

 

The door closed with a whisper that made Quatre tense nonetheless. He forced himself to relax before Trowa could pick up his reaction, and instinctively smoothed the lines of his own body like straightening out rumpled sheets. Soft shuffling, the sound of lacings being untied, boots pulled off... Quatre hesitated, then turned his head on the pillow to look at the shaman undressing in the small fraction of starlight and a sliver of moon.

"What was all the fuss about?" he whispered.

Trowa didn't turn around and his movements continued smoothly as he removed his jerkin from his shoulders. "I threw Svale in the horses' water trough."

"She sober now?"

"Is she ever? But she was conscious enough to call them."

"The wardens?"

"Yes. We'll need their help if we're going to get this to work." Quatre watched the leather pants slide off the long legs and firm buttocks, and wished he could fish some desire from the morass of information and output Zero was feeding him.

The spell was pricking him, trying to integrate the wardens and their role in the strategies that were unfolding in his mind. He knew Svale was one of a very small group of powerful beings that Center had created to keep a sentient eye on the potentially dangerous land of Gods and Sources. He didn't know what they were like though, or their abilities. If Svale was a typical example, well, even Zero would have a hard time integrating them into any kind of sensible strategy.

"What are they like? Have you met them?"

"Once," Trowa grunted as he slipped under the cover.

"They as bad as Svale?"

"Nothing is as bad as Svale," Trowa muttered, and Quatre remembered the shaman had just had the unenviable task of sobering her up against her will. "As individuals they're okay, I guess."

"Ah?"

"As a group, it's like dealing with six cantankerous tomcats."

"Oh." Quatre was silent for a second, then grimaced. "I've just thought of half a dozen Svales, please tell me-"

"Not that bad."

"Oh good."

Quatre felt the shaman settle, partway on his side and turned towards Quatre.

"They'll think of a solution for this shield. It's their job." Trowa's voice was calm and factual. "They are the minds of Center, an element of her defense against the dangers that could threaten her."

Quatre nodded in the near-total darkness. A planet as rich in Sources as Center was, was bound to become nearly sentient after awhile. Every weird and wonderful lifeform, every god and demi-god, every Nightwalker and warden was a part of her. Trowa had explained this to Quatre way back in his small room in the tiny clinic near the swamp. Quatre had been aware - he'd been warned - before Trowa even became his lover that the man was not entirely his own master, but a piece of something greater. It had not impacted their lives greatly at first. Quatre felt a sharp pain in his gut as he remembered that first year of wandering. Sometimes the vardo headed in the direction Center dictated and other times they went where they wanted, it really had not mattered because they were together. It wasn't as if Trowa's duties, if you could call them that, were involving. Most of the time the shaman simply had to go where the lines led him and that was all. Quatre had been nonplussed at first; the shaman didn't actually do anything most of the time. He just went to one place, stayed there for awhile, then left again.

Now Quatre had been wrenched from the tapestry and could see the grand design from above. He could see how his lover and others who served the sentient planet of Sources were like nerve endings, their very presence triggering an effect that kept the planet aware and dreaming its deep dreams. Quatre could even see - very faintly - the awareness of the planet now focusing on his lover. Trowa was no longer just an identical piece of the planet's nervous system. When Center, through Svale, had asked Trowa to follow the line that had led him to Heero, he'd become one of the nodes at the heart of something big. And Quatre was one of them too. He brushed the tapestry curiously, looking at the many threads he was tangled in; Center, Duo, Svale, they all had their strings tied to him and were playing him, more or less intentionally. Zero could show him the snarl of connections that tied him down to the present situation, though it couldn't cut him loose. Because -

"May I hold you?"

Because the strongest thread of all was tangled around his heart and soul. A part of Quatre watched, helpless, as his mind splintered under the effect of that gentle, almost hesitant whisper.

I love him.

He's trying to limit me.

It's because he loves me. Deeply, entirely, intensely.

It's holding me back.

Then I don't want to go forward.

Then I'll be a puppet again. Duo made me shoot the one I love more than my own soul, and he only made me weaken the bolt because Trowa is still useful in his schemes. I couldn't stop him!

It won't happen again!

How will I stop it? I'm weak.

I'll get stronger.

I let it happen.

I'll get stronger!

He won't let me.

Because he knows he could lose me.

In the world outside his mind, Quatre saw the lines seize around his silence, could see how, if he did nothing in the next three seconds, Trowa would catch a hint of the screaming internal debate, would be hurt at his lover's hesitation. Options expanded in the healer's mind like a deck of cards fanning out, he chose the best solution quickly, scooting over to move into Trowa's arms, while turning away slightly to press his back against his lover; a carefully calculated gesture that was an acceptance of contact with a gentle refusal for anything further. Warm arms folded tenderly around him, pressing him to the firm chest. Comforting, restraining. Loving, smothering. Trowa was not one to force a conversation, he was giving Quatre time to work it out; he was being very tolerant and understanding...without understanding anything at all. But then, Quatre wasn't explaining anything to him either.

He knew Trowa and himself well. In his Zero-enhanced mind, the conversation where he'd try to explain his needs and desires to Trowa branched out like a tree. Each word Quatre could use was lined up with the predicted response from the shaman, with a statistical calculation weighing each path. And each branch of the tree ended in conflict. Quatre squeezed his eyes shut as if that could stop him from seeing the arborescence of probabilities that Zero was gleefully drawing out for him.

Trowa loved Quatre. And the person he loved was changing, becoming someone very different. In essence, Trowa would be losing him. Zero was pointing out to him every instance of affection and words of love from the shaman; it dissected Trowa's past actions and words and laid the result out on display. The shaman was attached to Quatre's gentleness, kindness, his loving nature, his tenderness. Quatre could see each one of those qualities being shed like dead petals in the future Zero promised him. But he had to lose them. They were weaknesses he could not afford if he wanted to defend what he had, if he wanted to affect the tapestry rather than being a hapless thread. But he didn't want to lose Trowa in the process.

Zero couldn't help him with this. Well, that wasn't quite true, the spell did in fact have a solution, and was getting rather pushy in trying to get Quatre to accept it. Zero was a weapon of war, and as such it didn't place love very highly as a goal to achieve. It didn't even fully understand it. Love was equated to a weakness, something holding Quatre back from becoming what he could be. So Zero was trying to push him to accept one more change, one more mutation of his mind, adding on to the others he'd already reluctantly accepted. This one would allow him to dominate, even eliminate his emotions. Break right out of the internal debate raging in his mind, hampering his growth. Cut the last thread binding him helplessly to his fate. Make him the master of himself as well as his destiny.

Quatre's hands clasped Trowa's arms and drew them tighter around him like a blanket, drawing the warmth to him like a shield. The shaman tightened his grip, pressed a kiss like the brush of a tear against the nape of Quatre's neck. The healer instinctively noted the strands of the shaman's lines; he was worried, but Quatre felt pretty sure that Trowa could only sense the edge of the struggle. He probably thought Quatre was still confused by the new vision he'd been given. He wouldn't believe Quatre would have the strength to cope with anything more.

Above all, he would not understand that Quatre would want more...

Best to stay silent. Hide this from him. Quatre would fight this out between his conflicting inner desires, alone.

Hopefully this would not stop him from doing what had to be done, or the only winner of all of their struggles would be Jusan.

\---

Next Chapter: The Trouble With Wardens

So _this_ is the concentrated might and wisdom of the planet Center in action? Good to know we’re all fucked, then; there’s no fun in suspense.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another somewhat content-heavy chapter, as it's establishing a new status quo and outlining some of the events to come. In the next chapter we get back to arguing, fighting and hot guys being hot. Thank the gods!


	23. The Trouble With Wardens

"What you did was insane, Svale!"

"I didn't see any of you senile old fossils come up with anything!"

"You're older than all of us put together-"

"Am not!"

"- and for your information I have people up in orbit planting a mystical mine-field that will-"

"Mine-field? I hate to agree with Svale, but that won't even slow the Scourge down-"

"See? See?"

"That's interesting,” said a quieter voice in the background. “The headpiece is trying to flash information directly into your eye, almost subliminally... "

"Hn"

"But Svale, what you did was unconscionable! You just told the Scourge to hurry up and attack us because we're trying to set up some defenses to stop him!"

"As they say, 'An enemy forewarned is an enemy armed doubly.'"

"Oh shut up, the both of you. I already told you-"

Trowa discreetly rubbed his eyes - though no-one was paying attention to him and Quatre, sitting off to one side of the open cirque of standing stones and pillars. He glanced to the right as he felt his lover shift by his side. Quatre's eyes were a bit wide as they flickered over each warden in turn.

"Jusan can have an army here in less than two weeks, you know!"

"And I _told you_ I didn't trigger the spell on purpose!"

"That'll make us feel so much better when our sub-atomic particles are getting aerated by a well-placed mana flare!"

"That won't happen if we get the fucking shield working!"

"We can't get it working, Svale. I know Jishin work well enough to know that we need at least three hearthstones, and we don't have any."

"As they say, 'The best-laid plans go awry.'"

"'Best-laid plans'? We're cool then."

"What's that supposed to mean, G?!"

In the background, another quiet mutter: "Fascinating... take off your shirt... hmmm."

Quatre shifted again. "So these... are the wardens."

"Yes," Trowa answered, trying not to sound too tired.

"And this is who we're counting on to come up with a solution?" Quatre turned towards him slowly.

"Yes," Trowa answered with a shrug.

Quatre stood up and went to get a drink from the table of refreshments Svale had reluctantly set out for her guests. Trowa could have sworn his lover had muttered something to himself as he left. It had sounded like 'we're screwed'.

"H!” Svale screeched. “You're standing there like a fat stump without sayin' nothing! You have strong mystical connections with Center, you can tell us where to find some stones! It's not like anybody here has any," Svale added, and ignored the furious gazes trying to nail her to the floor.

"I wish I could, Svale. But it'd take me days to get into a trance that would allow me -"

"Get started then! Here, let me get you a chair. Trowa! Get the man a chair!"

"I need more than a chair, Svale,” said H patiently. 

"Okay, okay, all of you shut up,” said O, the one guardian who hadn’t spoke up yet (and who’d caught the tankard Svale had hurled at G earlier.)

"I-"

"Shut up, Svale. Look, what's done is done-"

"As they say, 'It is a wise man who can roll with the blows.'"

"S... you're not helping here,” said O patiently. “Jusan is going to accelerate his attack, but we might be able to hold his men off. The creature is still several months away from Center. Between the six of us we can gather together a lot of power, enough to stall an army."

"While we look for some hearthstones! Good thinking, O! Knew one of you old geezers had some brains!"

The smell of tea pricked Trowa's nose and he turned to see Quatre sit down, sipping distractedly. Another cup was being held towards the shaman.

"I didn't want any tea, thank-" He realized his cup contained water, and took it with a prickle of unease, though he made no further comment. Quatre said nothing either. His blue eyes were fixed on the four figures in the center of the cirque, grouped around Svale's diminutive form.

The wardens were elderly in appearance, like Svale. The magic that kept them alive and intact didn't much care about looks, in fact several of them were scarred from their eventful lives from before their calling. They were all very different in outlook, arcane ability, knowledge and temperament. Center had deliberately chosen them for that. The one thing they had in common, besides their apparent age, was their natural habit of meddling in the affairs of Center and all those around them. It was their calling, of course, but Trowa suspected it would be their hobby too, if the job wasn't there to justify it. They were dressed in a wild variety of styles. H was dressed in clerical robes, simple and sober. O, a former bureaucrat and diplomat from the Shai-Dess isles, was dressed in an oriental style, brown tunic, pants and slippers. G, under his wild hair and nose, was dressed in a mage tunic, rather the worse for wear, with a coffee stain on the collar and burn marks on the cuffs. S, Trowa’s fellow shaman, was dressed in plain riding leather as usual. And...

Trowa and Svale realized at the same time that someone was missing, and glanced off to the far side, where Heero was sitting on a rock, bare-chested, with someone leaning close to his naked skin, fingering Wing's chest-plate.

"J!" Svale screeched like a scalded cat. "What are you doing to my boy?! You old pervert!"

"There was so much irony in those words," J murmured, still examining Wing, "that a small black hole opened on the other side of the galaxy just to compensate."

"Get your hands off!" Svale skittered over as if she were rolling on ball-bearings. "The only one who can grope gorgeous is me!"

"I'm only interested in this armor he's wearing." J ignored the staff threatening his head.

"Then you're a kink as well as a perv!"

J finally glanced down at her. The light flashed off the high-tech goggles he was wearing, but even with his eyes covered and his long mustache shadowing his mouth Trowa could feel the man's annoyance.

"Can someone please kill this old bag for me?"

"Can't. She's too tough," G grumped, coming up behind a fuming Svale.

"Then there's something very wrong with the universe." J took up one of Heero's hands. Trowa tensed, but the fighter appeared supremely indifferent to all of the fuss around him. J examined the wrist guards before taking an elaborate optical piece from the pocket of his ever-present lab coat. He fixed it on to one of his goggles, and peered at the armor more closely.

"What you got there?" G caught Svale's staff before she thwacked J and looked curiously over his fellow warden's shoulder.

Trowa wondered if he should interfere. J... J was no joke. The man could be chillingly callous when the defense of Center called for it. Behind her usual mask of a cheerful old lech, Svale was almost certainly trying to keep J away from Heero and Wing.

"So Trowa, how are you?"

The Nightwalker turned away from the argument around Heero to nod to S, who had, for the moment, stopped spouting his usual platitudes and come over to talk to him.

"Well enough, sir." S had been a Nightwalker before he'd been called to the service of Centre as a warden. When Trowa had been called as well, S had been his mentor. "Oh, S, this is Quatre Rebarba Winner. Quatre, this is... Quatre?"

"How do you do?" Quatre said without looking away from J, Heero, G and an aggravated Svale. His eyes were narrowed and flicking around the four as if he was following a spindle rapidly darting across a growing tapestry.

Trowa sighed internally and turned towards S, knowing the old man wouldn't be overly offended; none of the wardens were known for their manners, except for H, who had been a high-ranking priest in the worship of Gaia before being called to serve his goddess in a much more precise and down-to-earth way.

S grabbed one of the chairs and sat down at an angle to Trowa. "That young man J is examining...he's the one you found at the end of your line, isn't he?"

"Yes. His name is Heero Yuy. It apparently means the one and only in the Old Tongue, though I've heard from a completely unreliable source that my accent stinks."

S quirked an eyebrow at him, but didn't comment. His chock-white hair stood up as if frightened, and the sun played off the guard he wore over the ruins of his nose - a victim of a rather nasty encounter with a venom wyrm before he became a warden. Once Center had chosen him as one of her wardens, he's become untouchable, like Svale and the others; he was as enduring as the planet, and would be so until Center no longer required his services or until the planet was destroyed. These days the latter eventuality seemed the more likely.

"Is he the one who will fight Jusan, assuming the creature even gets here while we're all still alive?"

Trowa nodded. S scratched his head, adding a bit more havoc to the wild hairdo. "He doesn't look like much. But as they say, 'One should not judge a dragon by its hide.'"

"Not until you've seen Heero pound one into the dirt," Quatre agreed distantly, eyes still flickering over the trio after G had stomped back towards the others.

"People!" G shouted, at the center of the cirque. "We need to decide what to do about the Scourge! If Jusan blasts the planet all the way out from orbit, Svale's boy toy won't be able to do much whether he's wearing Dragon armor or a thong and a feather."

Svale made an Eep sound in the background, her eyes crossing at the mental picture.

"We have months before Jusan gets here," H said slowly. "In that time I should be able to pinpoint some energy sources that can be used as hearthstones, if you think you can adapt them to the use, G?"

"Svale?" G turned towards Svale, then snapped his fingers in front of her eyes a few times until he had her attention again. "You and I are the Jishin experts here. I can convert most power sources to work with a normal sanctuary, but do you know if that will work with this spell?"

"No idea." Svale shrugged. "But unless anyone else has any bright plans, it's as good as we got."

"How long do we have until Jusan gets here, precisely?" Master O asked, his deep bass voice echoing across the cirque towards J, who shrugged, turning away from Heero to join the rest.

"Best estimates are-"

"About a week."

There was a series of scuffling and scraping sounds as the people present turned towards the source of those last words.

Howard had appeared in all his glory - red shirt with brilliant blue and yellow parasols to be exact - at the entrance to the cirque.

"I was about to say, five months or so, Senior Cabalist Howard," J said calmly. "I'd be ready to give or take a month, but I don't think I can get it that wrong. The Scourge cannot rip ether and-"

"He can't, but his herald can." Howard sauntered down the slight slope leading towards the heart of the cirque.

As Howard's words sunk in, a horrified hush fell over those present. Trowa, cold sweat sending shivers up his spine, heard a small creak and glanced at Quatre, who'd leaned forward abruptly in his chair. The healer was staring at the old technologist with a strangely intense air.

A week...Trowa felt the leaden mass in his stomach grow. What could be done in a week? 

"A herald." J's voice was cold and slightly curious, he didn't seem touched by the fear that was lit in all their eyes. "I didn't think the Scourge had one anymore. Not one powerful enough to make a difference. And he'd take months to strengthen one of his current minions to the point he or she would be able to channel enough of Jusan's power to threaten us."

"He found better than his usual run of goons. One that's quite strong enough to wipe us all off the face of the planet." Howard grimaced, then turned towards Heero, to Trowa's surprise. "Hey, boy, remember that Dragon you beat up a few weeks back?"

Heero looked at him fixedly, but showed no signs of curiosity or anxiety.

"Well, he went and joined Jusan, of all people, and as a High Dragon with extremely powerful armor, he can carry a lot of the Scourge's power. A lot."

Next to Trowa, Quatre slowly leaned back in his chair, then pushed it back to balance on two legs, his eyes still on Howard. He started swaying back and forth. Trowa looked at the healer's lines, but didn't see anything out of place so brought his attention back to bear on the others.

"And you know this how?" J asked softly.

"My second wife's goldfish."

Trowa blinked. Had he missed something? Then he realized the wardens were just as puzzled.

"Goddamit Howard! If you're gonna show up completely toasted, the least you could do is bring some of that liquor with you!" Svale screeched.

"I'm as sober as the day I was born, though believe me I wish I wasn't," Howard grunted. "The Scourge has several technologists working for him, maintaining the Libra. One of them is my second wife. She keeps a journal on her private computer, and her admin password is the name of her childhood pet. I break into it on a regular basis just to keep an eye on what the Scourge is doing. Plus it gives me ammo to fend her off the day she decides to ask me for money. I swear she was never that sexually adventurous when she was with me."

"I wonder why," Svale muttered. "So she said - that is, recorded in her private diary which only a cad would read - that Jusan sent that Dragon as his herald?"

"That's right. Chang Wufei, of the Chang-Long clan. He took the Libra's best 'ripper, he'll be here in a week."

Creak-creak. Quatre was swaying back and forth on his chair, slowly. His eyes were fixed on Howard.

"As they say, 'The trumpets blow; the enemy approaches'," S said calmly.

"We're screwed," G agreed. "An army we could have dealt with. A herald, with all of Jusan's powers at his command...well, not all of them, no human could bear that, but a good deal if what I hear of Dragons is correct - O? You spent some time with them back when you were an emissary. Am I panicking for nothing?"

"No." O's deep voice sounded depressed. "The Dragons may be technologically orientated, but they have very strong souls and wills to be able to dominate their armor. That kind of mind could carry enough of Jusan's power to blow us all to kingdom come."

"Damn. Howie, you got a plan or are you just bringing us bad news?" G snapped, turning towards the technologist again.

"I've called the Cabals from all sides of the galaxy, well, those that have vessels that are less than a week away. Colony ships, transports-"

"You want to evacuate the planet?" H asked in a choked voice.

"You see any other choice? I mean, I know you six guys are linked to Center and so effectively stuck here and well, good luck. I hope you come up with something. In the meantime, I'll do my best to keep the death toll to something a bit less than a complete massacre."

"Do you have any idea of what effects the ruination of Center will have?" J asked calmly. “For all technologists like us hate to admit it, she is the spiritual center of the new human expansion. Her destruction would cause magic to virtually cease to function for eons, and the toll on the human zeitgeist...All your so-called survivors will probably be dead before the year is out, it'll be chaos."

Howard shrugged. He didn't seem all that nervous. Creak-creak. Trowa frowned and glanced at Quatre again, but his lover's face was still unreadable, calm, his lines undisturbed... 

Trowa felt a little frisson. No-one's lines should be undisturbed after hearing that they were all going to die in a week. What was Quatre thinking? And why was he hiding his lines from Trowa? The shaman didn't need to inquire about 'how'...

Creak-creak.

"H." Svale's voice was subdued. "Can we locate the hearthstones in a week?"

"No." H sounded very sure and rather sad at disappointing his colleagues.

"Svale..." O seemed thoughtful. "What is it that we need exactly to put up this shield? You managed to get it running without the hearthstones."

"Yes, I managed to get the planet's magnetic field to ripple once with the effect. But the stones are needed to set up a continuous resonance. Otherwise we're looking at a ripple that will fade away in a few seconds."

"But how did you generate that ripple?"

Svale shrugged. "I used the energy of the Source beneath the sanctuary. It's not very powerful, though; its main use is to provide the spell that the sanctuary transmits to the earth, not a power source. That's what the hearthstones are for. They build up and repeat the spell until the earth resonates with it and can continue to keep it up on it's own. The Source will not give you that much continuous energy."

"What if we gave it another power source..." J's voice was quiet, his goggles fixed on the ground beneath his feet.

"I'm open to suggestions but it's gonna have to be major," Svale pointed out.

"I'll leave you guys to think about it," Howard said. He'd wondered over to the refreshment table, poked suspiciously at a rather stale cake, looked regretfully at an empty bottle, and had visibly decided to call it quits. "As a vulgar techno cabalist, I'm not going to be much help with all this magic rigmarole. I need to organize the evacuation."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence, you old goat," Svale muttered, but she didn't put much heart into it.

"Every human who was born on Center is a part of her," G said abruptly. "Keep in mind that by evacuating massive portions of her population, you may be weakening her right when she needs all her strength."

"I don't buy all that mystical connection bullshit and you know it," Howard said firmly over his shoulder. "I won't ask anybody to die in the hope that they'll be a little extra spark of power for a potentially doomed planet. If you guys need a technologist - and O and J aren’t enough - you know how to reach me, but otherwise don't disturb me, I'm going to be very busy." He stomped out of the cirque.

"Thanks for warning us about the herald," O called after him politely. Everybody else just glared at the colorful retreating back then stared at the cirque. It was one of three, at different levels of the sanctuary. This one was the top one, a circle of several dozen meters in diameter under open sky, surrounded by standing stones, low brick walls, outcroppings of something that looked like glass, boulders, patches of sand... it seemed chaotic and unorganized, but Trowa had learned from Svale that each element and their order was important in the function of the round cirque. However it was useless as long as the small dip in its center remained empty of the hearthstone that was the power source of the whole construction.

The argument started as soon as Howard's colorful shirt had disappeared.

Trowa sighed and turned, to find an empty space where his heart should be.

He got up and wandered out of the cirque, following the slight tug of their connection, deep in thought. They were all concentrating really hard on getting the shield to work and of course that would stop the herald, but that was only a palliative measure. Trowa had felt the power of the shield, it was certainly disruptive, but against a force like Jusan? Could that actually-

"Don't lie to me. Talk."

He'd heard Howard's voice in the distance without paying much attention to the words. Quatre's voice was muffled by the breeze blowing over the sanctuary mounds, but clear enough. For all it had ended in a prompt for an answer the tone was incurious, distant. Cold. It brought Trowa's mind screaming to attention.

"I tell you boy, I don't know-"

"Howard." A gentle tone, that would have been reproving if it had cared enough to be so. Trowa accelerated with a feeling of foreboding.

"But-" Howard's voice was at a higher pitch.

"I can feel it. You're a part of his pattern, a link in his chain of control over events. Now tell me. Where... is... he?" The voice dropped to a whisper that was somehow more menacing than any shouting.

Trowa turned a corner. Howard and Quatre were a few meters away. The Techno cabalist had backed up against a rock. Quatre was just standing there - at a glance he was just standing there with his arms crossed, but to one who could read lines, he was standing too close to Howard and at the exact spot that would block any movement Howard might make towards either his ship or back to the cirque. It was a warning as clear as a bared knife. Quatre was smiling and - Trowa's heart thumped - it was still the same, gentle smile and clear blue eyes, and somehow that made the sense of threat even worse. 

"I don't know!" Howard snapped, and Trowa could tell even with a superficial read of his lines that the man was telling the truth. He was upset about something, but for that Trowa couldn't blame him. "Look, kiddo, I think that Zero shit is burning your brain-"

"Oh, but my brain is fine, Howard, you're the one I'm worried about," Quatre said with a smile like sunshine and a voice of commiseration. One of his hands against his upper arm curled into a fist. "You have no idea who you're dealing with. You might think you do, but if you believe you're controlling the situation in any way... No-one controls Shinigami, Howard. He's playing you like he plays everybody."

Trowa felt himself go numb. Paranoia. He didn't know what exactly Zero was showing to Quatre, but it was confusing him, making him see Duo's influence everywhere, making everyone appear to be puppets or conspirators of the plot that had cost Quatre so dearly.

Quatre drew a breath, then paused, and turned abruptly. His eyes rested on Trowa and for the breadth of a heartbeat they were hard and resentful of the interruption. And then it was gone. His face and lines were smooth and relaxed as they had always been, with just that slight distance in his eyes...

Anybody else would have discounted that flash of anger as a figment of their imagination. But the shaman knew what he saw and he trusted his senses implicitly. The lines coming from Howard were confused, but there was no sign of an immediate threat or betrayal. Trowa could not have said any more about the situation without meditation, moonlight or a Walk around the old man's lines. What had Quatre seen - or thought he'd seen?

Quatre reached across and idly straightened Howard's collar - the old man flinched - and stepped back slowly, turning a perfectly innocent gaze towards Trowa.

"Quatre...could I have a word with you?" Trowa asked in a weak voice. He didn't know what he wanted to say, but he didn't want Howard around. 

Quatre said nothing. He turned and walked away between the stones. Trowa followed and made a mental note in passing to return later and apologize to the extremely powerful technologist his lover had apparently threatened.

He'd expected Quatre to wait for him, but the light figure was walking down the hill with an unhurried pace, head tilted as if listening to something. Trowa ran and caught up.

"Quatre! Wait, what was that about?"

"Nothing that concerns you."

"What?!" Trowa caught Quatre by the elbow and spun him around. "Quatre, talk to me. Tell me what-"

Quatre's eyes were blank and fixed an inch above his ear. He appeared to be deep in thought. Trowa's mouth went dry.

"Svale needs you. That's all you need to know."

"What?" Trowa said weakly.

"That's about all that I can tell you. Anything else I say will lead this conversation down an avenue neither of us really want to go. Trust me, I've run all the probabilities," Quatre said precisely and turned. Trowa reached for him, only to find his lover had side-stepped as if he'd seen the movement ahead of time, and was walking down the hill again.

"And next time you think I’m succumbing to paranoid delusions,” Quatre said crisply over his shoulder, “just remember that I was right about Svale, and think about it." 

"What?! But-“

"Trowa!"

The shaman felt as if he'd walked into a wall that had materialized between himself and the disappearing figure.

It had been Svale's voice, ringing with urgency. Quatre had been right...

He stared at the retreating figure, his mind uncertain. Then he followed his instincts and turned back towards the cirque. Svale didn't sound dead serious like that - _Svale needs you_ \- unless there was something very wrong. He'd talk to Quatre later.

"Trowa! Get your ass- Oh there you are. Tell them they're fucking insane!" Svale was banging her staff on the ground and glaring at the other wardens. The other four had fallen behind J as if seeking some protection. J, at the forefront, was grinning like a skull, with no amusement whatsoever.

"What are you squawking about, woman. It's the perfect solution."

"It's lunacy, is what it is!"

"What solution?" Trowa asked sharply. He didn't like the way Svale's hands were gripping her staff.

"They want to channel Center’s own energy into this, and they want to use me as the conduit!" Svale snarled, glaring at J.

Surprisingly it was H who sighed. "Svale, I would gladly do it in your stead, but you know that none of us has the power to withstand-"

"Neither does Svale," Trowa said with quiet intensity, taking a step to stand next to his friend. "She's over five hundred, you can't expect her to do this."

"Yeah, I'm over- oh thanks, Trowa, that makes me feel so much better."

"She has the best chance of surviving it," J corrected, his demeanor as cold as his goggle-covered eyes.

"You're not listening, you old fool!" Svale screeched at him. "I’ll give my life for Center as well as any one of you, but that's not the point! I cannot teach G everything he needs to know about manipulating the sanctuary in a week, not if I have to prepare for the channeling as well! I've been working for years to get this heap of rocks up to a point we can use it, it's attuned to me! If we use me as a channel, it might or might not kill me, but it will certainly do no good since there'll be no-one to direct the spell and start the chain reaction!"

"That is a problem," G sighed, acknowledging her words. "J? You're the second strongest here?"

"I'm not as powerful as the old bag," J said with a shrug, "but I can try-"

"No one should try! It's what I'm wasting my lungs telling you!" Svale jumped up and down. "Granted Center can give us enough power, but it'll be evanescent at best! And we can't afford to lose any wardens at this point. We need to find a better idea!"

"We're open to suggestions." J put his hands in his lab coat pockets and smiled at her coldly. "And to address your question...yes, the power will dissipate and reabsorb into Center, but it will give us some leeway to defeat the herald on equal terms, and a few months to look for hearthstones. Sounds like a plan to me."

"Could I do it?" Trowa asked softly. He glanced around instinctively, looking for Quatre, hating himself for making the suggestion when he knew he was not the only one concerned by it...but his life belonged to Center as well as to his lover.

"Get that out of your head you foolish boy!" Svale's staff caught him near the ear in that moment of inattention.

"You don't have the strength, Trowa," S said quickly, looking sideways at J who looked momentarily thoughtful before also nodding.

"Well who-"

Quatre was standing at his elbow, smiling at them. It was the most disturbing smile Trowa had ever seen, and he's stared harpies and great wyrms in the teeth.

"I just thought you'd want to know... " A chuckle escaped Quatre. It was light, aimless and it seemed to surprise and amuse the healer. "Just for your information, we may have something of a problem. But at least I'm absolved of one crime. I swear I will not let Duo get away with this, though."

Trowa and Svale turned to look where Quatre had pointed over his shoulder. A few of the wardens glanced over as well.

Just as everyone focused at the empty space between two ley stones, a man climbing up the lip from the outside of the cirque appeared in their frame. For a thunderous moment Trowa thought it was Duo, but the man's hair was blonde and flowing loose, and his features were older and sharper than the amiable manipulator's cheeky grin.

"Hot damn...Hot damn! I don't care what you say, I'll never get tired of seeing all these gorgeous men show up on my doorstep!" Svale squawked, and shot off towards the newcomer who, Trowa had to admit, was indeed quite attractive. He wore cream-colored leathers, a long white jacket and a short sword at his side. His hair hung like a banner of white gold down his back. Under his bangs, ice-blue eyes widened in alarm and he took two steps back from Svale, proving that the ethereal beauty was, in fact, human and subject to the same gut reactions as every other male subjected to the crone's attentions.

"Hello, gorgeous!" Svale shouted and tried to latch on to one of the glorious long legs, only to be foiled by a sidestep. "Who you looking for? Please tell me you want someone to fulfill all your fantasies?"

"Not quite." The voice was melodious, a bit hard. Next to Trowa, Quatre chuckled again.

The stranger's eyes flitted over the assembled people, resting on Heero, then on Quatre, then on Heero again.

"Not quite. I'm looking for my murderer."

 

Next Chapter: Epyon, Wing and the Matter Of Choice

*slow clap* way to make an entrance, Fen.


	24. Epyon, Wing and the Matter Of Choice

"I'm looking for my murderer," the stranger said.

There was a moment of complete silence. The bizarre statement hung in the air as if surprised at being uttered in the prosaic light of day.

Then Svale's staff came smashing down on to the rocky ground and light flared - a much more interesting, exciting light than sunshine could ever provide - rushing together in three arcs to imprison the new arrival in a cage of golden flickers.

Even Quatre was impressed by Svale's speed. But of course he knew that a lot - well some - of her lechery was an act to throw people off. Five hundred plus years of existence had given her a nose for trouble, and she'd approached the intruder prepared for it (though of course if it had turned out he'd simply been a lost traveler inquiring for directions, she'd have taken the opportunity to flirt with such a good-looking specimen as a matter of course).

"Sorry sweetheart!" she cackled, voice canting above the crackle of the containment field she'd cast. "It's a pity to put something so pretty behind a no-touch barrier, but I have the nasty feeling -"

"Svale, get back!" Quatre gasped, surprised she was still standing there despite the danger that was obvious to his eyes.

Behind the barrier, energy was gathering, rippling along the man's limbs.

Quatre hooked a hand beneath Trowa's elbow a second before the shaman would have leaped forward to go and help Svale with the doomed containment field.

"Stay here," he ordered without noticing the imperious tone in his voice until Trowa's eyebrows shot up. "Svale, get away from him. I don't think he recognizes you."

"Recognizes me?" Svale was smart, she was taking several cautious steps back, following Quatre's advice. The lanky newcomer had crossed his arms over his chest, a picture of relaxation, but the barrier was starting to spark and crackle alarmingly.

"I'm not sure he knows who any of us are," Quatre said slowly. "But his Zero is telling him Heero and I were involved in his death, so-"

"What?!" Trowa spun to stare at him. 

Svale was suddenly before him, staff planted into the dirt supporting her weight as she scrambled up it to stare straight into his eyes. "Talk to me, Quatre. Who is this and what do you know and don't tell me how, I don't need another headache."

Quatre was momentarily speechless. In his distracted mind the barrier was shattering over and over again, each scenario playing out, the first lines of attack - against Heero, who would be the one to step forward. Each probability dancing - no, that was the future. Concentrate on the now, the present. Svale...Svale didn't know-...?

"Don't you know?"

"Know what?"

"But-" Quatre's head suddenly ached, it often did. The man's aura, his attitude, the armor he wore, the curls of Zero around him - how could they not recognize him?

It came as a bit of a shock to Quatre to realize that only he could see the armor hidden beneath the leathers and jacket, or the way the man's Zero spell was analyzing and probing the barriers to find a crack, or the lines and vectors that made up an identity much more surely than a face that changed with age...It shocked him that he'd forgotten that other people couldn't see this. It seemed so natural to him, like being able to see the color blue, or distinguishing shape from shadow. They couldn’t see this? He couldn't even remember their limitations...

"Don't you recognize him? He's your friend. Fen."

Svale's jaw dropped.

"Fen?" Trowa look slowly from Quatre to the - temporarily - imprisoned man. Eyes narrowed, then widened in a confused surprise. "I- I think he's right! There are similarities in the lifelines, and in the aura. But-"

"You're sure? I'm not delusional again, am I?" Quatre muttered before he could stop himself. His Zero-enhanced mind berated him, showing him the likely consequences of the slip. Quatre winced. His mind lashed out like a whip, herding the future along one line rather than another; in the real world, he let his eyes widen as he stared at Fen, encouraging everybody to follow his glance, a distraction while he attenuated the import of his words from their minds by tweaking the strands of the future, the sway of their thoughts. It shouldn't be hard. Trowa was a practical man, more intrigued by the dead walking than a snippy answer from his lover.

"How is this possible?" Trowa's voice was flat as he finally turned from Fen back to Quatre. "He was old, senile and very, very dead last time we saw him. And we'll talk about the rest of what you said later." Green eyes tried to catch and drill into his own.

Quatre did not take his eyes off of Fen to avoid giving Trowa an opening to talk about it now. His lover was still the hardest to manipulate. Trowa's eyes were distracting him, the trickles of hurt and anger and love coming from the well-known mind were muddying his own feelings, he couldn't afford-

He used one of the control programs, Ephemeral Schism. Zero didn't care what its programs were called, but the Jishin who had created it were a playful and oddly poetic people, and the spell had some very strangely named subroutines as a result. Schism was one of the emotional and mental control programs; stronger than Basic Padding and Buckets, which allowed him to keep the Zero I/O separate from his mind and emotions, so he could at least have a chance of telling the difference between the two. Schism allowed him to put up a glass wall between himself and his feelings until a crisis was past. They were still there and he could keep an eye on them - _guilt/pain/anger/love - if he’d been the one pressuring Howard, I would never have doubted he had a good reason! But no, he thinks I'm mad - in a way I am, but I have to do this and he won't understand-..._ Quatre could still see the feelings roiling and tearing at him, but he was temporarily unable to feel the damage, and they couldn't interfere. For a time. Then the glass would shatter and they would come roaring out again.

There's an easier way...the tempting whisper came from Zero, or maybe from a part of Quatre that was tired of being torn and torn again. But he still resisted the total redesign of his mental and emotional pattern that Zero kept trying to push on him - Stone Rose, Zero had termed it, where the glass wall would become opaque and permanent, severing him forever from his own ‘weaker feelings'. Despite the pain, he feared that severance much more than the emotional backlash that would occur once Schism had elapsed and his emotions hit him with their full power, increased by guilt and his delay in dealing with them, like waters from a breaking dam sweeping him away.

Which they'd been doing frequently. Hardly a day had gone by without him having to use one or the other of the lesser control programs, and paying the price for it later.

"Fen?!"

Quatre's mental turmoil had erupted and smoothed in the few seconds it took Svale's jaw to slot back in place and turn to stare at her captive - captive minus 10 seconds, Quatre estimated coolly.

"Heero." The icy grip of Schism had set his priorities right. "Kick him out of the cirque."

Everyone around him was still reacting - "Who the hollering Hades is Fen?!" G was shouting in the background - but Heero was half way to Fen already. Fen did have a legitimate complaint - Quatre felt a curl of laughter rise in his chest again and crushed it - but the bearer of Epyon could not be allowed to wreck the cirque and the sanctuary, destroying their one chance to cast a shielding spell that would stale-mate Jusan and his herald.

"Heero, go right," Quatre said quickly. Heero once more obeyed him without question. A whole section of Zero - Oddities Analysis was the prosaic name - was permanently running in the back of Quatre’s mind, dedicated to trying to figure out who Heero was and why he seemed to listen to Quatre and Trowa's advice when he ignored almost everyone else. So far Zero had come up a blank.

Fen's version of Zero found the flaw. The right side of Svale’s barrier had not set flush against its two counterparts. Something rustled along Fen's arm, darting out to smash at the weakness. Fen's arm lifted quickly as the barrier faded. A crossbow bolt shattered on his suddenly armored forearm. Next to Quatre, an impassive Trowa grabbed another bolt from his belt and reloaded his crossbow. Quatre wasn't surprised that Trowa had shot Fen before the barrier had even fully dissipated; Trowa's visions of battle lines were not as complete or as foreseeing as the healer's, but he could pinpoint a weak spot in a shield with the ease of a shaman with a lot of battle experience. Quatre felt an absurd flush of pride which he immediately locked behind the same glass wall as the rest.

Fen's hand curled into a fist and, still on the same arcing move that had caught the bolt, swung at Heero as well. The warrior, forewarned where the barrier would break, dodged it almost lazily and hammered into his foe, sending him stumbling from the cirque.

Everyone went rushing to the lip of the slight bowl-like area to keep an eye on the fight. Quatre followed more slowly. At this point Zero was feeding him so much information on Fen and his abilities, visual stimulus would be hard to bear; he had to trust Heero to stop Fen from killing them all until Quatre figured out how best to deal with this.

They were still at the stand-off stage when Quatre drew next to Trowa. Fen was fully armored, and a cold little silence had fallen among the wardens who had been garrulously asking for explanations about 'the weird blond' up till now. Epyon had covered Fen in plates of solid armor and energy, rippling up and down his lean frame, ionizing the air around him. Sunshine gleamed on metal the color of blood. It was obvious he wasn't just some wandering madman.

Wing had also deployed. Less impressive than Epyon's full coverage, the wrist guards rose to the forearms, the anklets had risen to form greaves protecting the front of the leg and the back of the knees, and there was a thin plate covering his chest and abs. It didn't look like much, but Quatre could see the dance of energy and potent lines as Wing created an invisible barrier to protect its bearer.

Fen and Heero were eyeing each other like a couple of cats. Very big cats. Insanely strong cats armed with energy weapons. Quatre cast a worried eye behind him, automatically calculating the risk of the sanctuary being damaged during the confrontation, even if they were several meters away from it now. Hopefully this wouldn't get out of hand.

"I don't know who you are, boy. I can see you're no average punk," Fen started to say slowly. "I'm not necessarily here to fight you."

Ah, that sounds promising, Quatre thought.

"But I will rip you and every one of those present to shreds if you do not give me my soul back."

Not so promising...

"Soul?! What did you guys do to him?!" Svale gasped.

"Nothing," Trowa bit back. "Well, we killed him, but nothing more. I don't know-...Unless..."

"Duo. He must have done something," Quatre sighed. He didn’t need Zero to figure out that once more Shinigami had landed them into hot water.

Heero hadn't answered Fen's threat or shown any sign of curiosity. He simply waited.

Fen stared at him, then at Quatre. The healer could feel it. Outwardly the man looked relaxed, almost uncaring. Inside he was a howling pit of anguish. What did Duo do to him? Quatre thought anxiously. He's not going to listen to reason, he's going to-

"Heero - look out!"

It was stupid to shout! Zero cracked across his mind like a whip. Fortunately Heero had not needed the warning and was not distracted by it. He went from completely passive and waiting to a deadly bullet of intent in a fraction, as soon as Fen moved.

He curled himself below Epyon's whip that had materialized even as it snaked towards his head. Running in a crouch, he darted one way, then another. The whip licked the air over his head, missing him again. The crack scorched the air around the watchers. Heero reached Fen and punched, but Epyon/Zero had analyzed the attack, and Fen was both dodging and retaliating. Fen spun, backhanding Heero - who caught the blow on his wrist-guard - and then continuing the spin to hit him with the whip’s hilt.

Heero took the blow on his shoulder armor, ready to follow through - but the whip curled like a live tentacle! It wrapped itself around his body -

Heero threw himself forward, knocking Fen down and then slipping out of the tightening coil. He reached in, tore the whip from the armored hand.

Another one was forming even as Heero took a step forward to hammer the form scrambling away from him.

Zero spat and sparkled like neon behind Quatre's eyes. He groaned - maybe aloud - trying to subdue the input. He triggered a few programs - Information Mining, Broad Outlines and Aspirin Please - in an attempt to control what he was seeing, and not let it drive him insane. Heero...strangely enough, it was Heero that was the problem. Quatre had only met Fen once, the man had an unknown Dragon armor and Zero, yet the statistics and probabilities he generated were behaving themselves. It was Heero...always Heero the biggest headache. Even after all their months together, even after unleashing the full might of the Zero calculations, well, as full as Quatre would let it, he still didn't know entirely what Heero was capable of or what he would do, and that made the dance of probabilities completely insane and on the verge of making him so too.

Quatre rode and controlled the input with the skill, power and rugged determination with which he controlled the beat of lifeblood through a dying man's veins. Forget Heero, forget the fight, he needed the broader picture...

Fen rolled over his shoulder in a backward somersault and got to his feet, whip cracking to give him space. Heero glared at it, then at the whip he had in his hands, as if wondering how many more he had to tear away before Epyon was no longer capable of generating them. His eyes narrowed menacingly as he looked back at Fen. The empty sword hilt that usually dangled at his side suddenly detached itself and hurtled into his hand.

Trowa gasped and Quatre bit his lip as Zero went wild again, trying to predict the broader outlines of the fight. They’d never see Heero use the sword before.

Light burst from the hilt like a single, leashed lick of flame. Heero smiled - a cold movement of lips that spoke of blood - and attacked, batting the whip aside and causing sparks to ignite as light touched the dark energy running through Epyon's metal.

Fen parried with the whip's hilt. His other gloved hand flickered and another sword appeared, a hissing fury of flame, swinging towards Heero's head. Heero dodged, his sword came up to block while his other hand swung and hammered into Fen's mailed fist and made him drop the whip again.

"I don't believe it... who the hell is this kid...?" It was J's voice. It sounded... very thoughtful. Zero flashed a few warning signs in Quatre's mind. He set aside a subroutine to watch that development, while he concentrated on where the lines were taking the battle.

He almost had it! Heero was an unknown quantity even for Quatre, but he could still 'see' some of his effects on the future and-

The two swords clashed in a hiss of battling flames. Heero spun in towards his opponent, his sword sliding along Fen's, and crashed his shoulder into the taller man. Fen staggered back. Heero continued to spin to strike him with his sword from the other side, but Fen managed to twist out of the way-

Quatre bit his lip, tasted blood. Zero cataloged it as a minor wound as its conclusions started to dart through the healer's mind:

\- _Herald, Jusan, Center, Sanctuary, Duo_ Zero muttered -

\- we already killed him once, he has reason to see us as enemies, a gentler Quatre suddenly cried.

Heero followed through, his free hand grabbing Fen's sword hand at the wrist and bringing his own weapon back-

\- and we can't hurt him again it's just not right! 

\- _Heero, Fen, death, soul, rebirth, blackmail, ally_ Zero concluded.

"Heero don't kill him! We need him!"

For once the healer and the bearer of Zero came to the same conclusion at the same time.

Heero couldn't stop the blow, but twisted his wrist so the 'blade' scored Epyon's side instead of stabbing through his opponent. Then he released Fen and stepped back.

Fen's eyes were wide as he felt at his side, the hand span deep gash that went through his armor, the leather underneath and had cut the skin below.

Heero ignored him. He turned towards Quatre. The healer stared back, unable to put the whole concept that had come to him in words, not in time.

"Please Heero," he said, too weakly for the other to hear.

Heero stared at him. Then the sword flared and died and he dropped it to have it leap back towards his side.

"Mission accepted," he said in a flat tone.

Fen stared wildly at him, at the healer, then back at Heero again. For an instant Quatre thought he'd step down and ask for an explanation, but there was something wrong with him, with his mind. Whatever Duo had done to him had left him confused, he seemed unable to follow through. He snarled and attacked Heero, sword swinging up, a whip materializing in his hands again, shorter but still deadly.

Heero turned away from Quatre almost lazily, lifted a hand and fired an energy blast almost point blank just as Fen was about to slice him in two lengthwise.

Behind Quatre, J gasped. Zero's subroutine integrated the feelings and the vectors of fate and intent streaming from the warden and presented the beginnings of an ugly picture to Quatre, but the healer, mind throbbing, set it side for now. The old man would not be able to force Heero into anything, whatever was going through J's cold, calculating mind.

What mattered now was -

"Stay here!" Quatre snapped at Trowa, trying to remove one variable from the equation as he ran towards Heero and a fallen Fen. Epyon had absorbed most of the blast, but it had still knocked him off his feet. As he struggled to rise, Heero stepped, almost casually, behind him, grabbed his arms and pinned him in the same block Duo had used on Heero a couple of weeks ago.

Quatre was halfway to Fen before he realized that both Trowa and Svale had followed him, close enough where they would be variables in danger if Fen broke away from Heero. Svale was well nigh indestructible, but Trowa- Quatre could feel the worry pouring from his lover's mind, determination not to let Quatre go into danger alone. Twists of anger/guilt/misery/love joined the other emotions coiling behind Schism's glass wall in the healer's mind, waiting for release. Later... later.. 

Fen was snarling behind his mask, and fighting against Heero's hold. The enigmatic warrior was holding him as if he could do it all day and fall asleep in that position if he had to. Quatre gave Heero one look of utter thankfulness for following his request, and then concentrated on Fen.

"We don't have it, whatever it is you're looking for. We took nothing from you. There was another with us. Duo Maxwell. Shinigami. Shi No Kami, I mean." He could feel Fen's attention suddenly rivet on him. "I have to tell you about Shi No Kami... "

 

"Ah-tchoo!!"

Imp fell off the upturned beer mug he'd been sitting on.

"Ah-TCHOO!"

"Ma-"

Duo sneezed a third time. The hardened metal cup in his hand crumpled as if it were made of cardboard.

"Damn... " Duo sniffed, rubbing his nose.

"Master 're y'allirght?" Imp said, then its tiny brow wrinkled. "Mister are y'right?"

Duo grinned. Operation 'Get A Stone Drunk' successful. He'd not been able to get Imp to try any liquor to start with, but after several days of drinking, the alcohol content in Duo's bloodstream was enough to make Imp completely sloshed after the third thimble-full. He hadn't thought Imp's silicate composites could be affected by ethanol...maybe Duo's blood and the spell that had created Imp were setting up a sympathetic resonance of the master's state in the little golem. Which would mean that Imp would eventually become the first stone to ever experience a hangover. Either way, it was quite funny. Duo watched with considerable amusement as the tiny creature tried to scramble back up the beer mug, apparently forgetting it could fly. That was probably just as well. In its condition it would plaster itself to the wall, or maybe the ceiling.

"You falling cold Master? Er, you catching a sick? I mean-"

"No, just some dust I think." Duo's voice was steady, only a certain slowness indicating his inebriety. It was deliberate. Oh, he wanted to talk. Like quicksilver, like a fountain! He wanted to tell the barmaid who had stopped trying to flirt with him just how many threads and plans were coming to fruition now, and how this would save her, this miserable little dive and the lovely rows of bottles behind her if it worked, and what were the huge chances it could still fail... Fortunately discretion - running and hiding he snorted softly - were second nature to him now. Even if she would be completely unable to understand him, someone else might. Someone might recognize the fluid accent that was trying to take over his voice as his words accelerated. The tripping tempo of words, like a melody...Duo grimaced. He was homesick. This was such a constant state of being for him, he would almost miss it if he weren't. 

Come on, now, Maxwell. Let's not become a sad drunk.

He noted from far away the continuing commotion near the bar. It had been going on for some time. He'd isolated himself in one of the darker booths so that Imp wouldn't draw too much attention. Leaving the tiny little creature behind hadn't even crossed his mind. He chuckled as Imp reached the pinnacle of the upturned mug and gently tumbled down the other side with a rocky thump, staring at the crude wooden table in surprise.

What was going on over there? He turned towards the bar. The waitress had a radio blaring something out. Nice techno gadget, if it could cut through the interference Center placed on most broadband and lowband. He was surprised to see it in such a dive. The hand-made look clued him in; the owner of the bar was probably a techno fan, a ham radio fiend. What on earth had everybody so interested? The whole bar was clustering around it.

“...this announcement by the Sweeper Cabal has put the whole of Center in a panic,” the radio announcer was saying. “Most estimates of the energy levels of the being known as the Scourge indicates it has enough power to decimate the entire planet. The spokesperson for the Cabal announced during a press conference an hour ago that plans to counter Jusan were being made, but refused to elaborate. Instead, the spokesperson asked the population not to panic, and indicated that steps were being taken to evacuate Center, starting with the bigger population centers and -“

"Whaaat?" Imp was grasping the top of the beer mug but had turned to look in the direction of the broadcaster’s voice.

Duo sighed and scooped Imp up, put it on his shoulder. Then he caught it as Imp tumbled backwards. He glanced around carefully, but everybody was riveted by the broadcast. No one was paying him any attention. His worn leathers rippled and suddenly the grubby jacket bore a deep breast pocket where none had been before. He poured Imp into it. With a hiccup of surprise the little creature righted itself and stuck a nose and a bleary black eye out again.

"Time to leave, pebble," Duo muttered.

"You're not shurprised, Mestar Duo?"

"No. Howard contacted me a few hours ago to warn me." Duo sighed. He looked longingly at the remains in the bottle on the table. Oh well... "Let's get out of here before panic spreads."

He stood and staggered slightly, fetching up against the stone wall crusted with soot and less mentionable substances. Damn, that wouldn't do. He sighed and glanced around, but no-one was paying any attention to the slight figure at the back of the bar. The radio was blaring the headlines out again. The waitress had her ear practically glued to it despite the volume, her hands twisting in her apron, her face pale. The other patrons were muttering amongst themselves. One of them broke away from the others and ran out of the bar.

Duo closed his eyes. For the past few days now his armor had been fussing at the back of his mind like a mother hen, trying to get at his bloodstream. Go ahead then, he muttered mentally. Immediately he felt prongs pierce his veins in his wrist and ankles. Duo smiled harshly at the pain as it jarred him from his anesthetized state. He relished the feel of the pull along his veins as the armor started to suck his blood from them and inject it back, cleansed from the alcohol and the poisons seeping from Duo's intoxicated liver. The pain increased as Duo prompted it silently, daring himself to go faster, feel more – it reminded him he was alive, despite the cost. The alcohol left his veins, slowly clearing his head. It would take an hour or so to fully dissipate the effects of a few days of solid drinking, but now he could walk straight. He sighed and looked at his pocket.

 

"You better not puke in there, pebble."

"I won't if you stop moving, Master." Imp had disappeared deeper into the pocket.

"I'm still leaning against the wall."

" ...You are?"

"Forget it. Let's go."

The darkness and loneliness waited for him outside of the liquor's warm fuzzy cloud. They were his old companions, just like the sentient stone hiccuping in his pocket, and his armor trying to clean him up and fussing over him. The feelings circled him like wolves in winter. He hated them and he loved them; they connected him to what had been lost. He fled them by becoming the laughing God of Death. He sacrificed his soul and body to them time and again. He gripped them like a lifeline whenever the impossibility of what he was trying to do threatened to bury him in despair. They were his joy and his pain and he was getting a little too used to combining both to drown out the voices in his head - this liquor binge being a case in point. But it would really not matter much in six month's time.

As he made his way through the bar’s crowds towards the door, he overheard threads of conversation.

"It's been all over the news for hours-"

" ...only a matter of time, the Scourge hates magic."

"I heard the Sweepers are forming a defense line. Someone is sowing mines in orbit."

"- the nomads in Goldsands are making a mandala that spans kilometers."

"Will it do any good?"

"Who knows? Me, I'm gonna head into space, near the moon. See what the Cabals have in mind."

"I thought they're just evacuating?"

"- I know how to launch a missile, and my sister can-"

"Oh please, they'll have some plan-"

"-heard the planet's mystic soul has been preparing for this. My boyfriend's got connections to the Priests of Gaia, something big's been brewing for -"

"I don't care! Jusan wants a fight he'll get it!"

Duo paused in the door. Humans...Damn...he kept underestimating them.

The bar’s owner put a comforting arm around the waitress - they were sisters, or married, or something, Duo couldn’t remember now. They stood hugging each other as they listened soberly to the radio. Other patrons armed themselves with liquor and courage, fear and determination blending in their eyes. Duo watched hands clap shoulders, fists pump the air in shared spirit, people hug and talk about family and homes and things to defend...

The darkness and the loneliness pounced.

Welcome back, my old friends...

"Come on, Imp. Let's go kick some powerful ass. We'll put the fear of Shi No Kami into the Scourge."

"Yesh - hic - Mashter."

 

"Shi No Kami..."

Emotions flashed across Fen's face, through his eyes. They were jumbled and confused, like shattered pieces belonging to several different pictures all crammed together. But at least he'd listened to Quatre's hurried explanations. And given some of his own in return.

"So he keeps his soul in a marble?" Svale repeated for the second time.

Fen snarled, giving small tugs, testing Heero's grip. "It's a - it was my Soul Stone. A small round stone on the end of a chain. I had it on me when I died. It's where I keep-... I need it! I need to know who I am!" 

"He's not human," Quatre said slowly, letting Zero analyze what Fen had said and what the healer could sense from the fractured mind before him. "I think he gets reborn every time he dies. That's so many lifetimes he can't remember them all, keep them all straight-"

"My memory, my self, my cohesion, it's in the stone!" Fen gave a sharp heave forward. Heero didn't even blink. His arms holding Fen didn't move a fraction either. "Let me go, you bastard! If this Shi No Kami has it, I'll go get it off him."

"Can you find him?" Quatre asked dryly and then said immediately: "No you can't. Or you'd have gone after Duo. You followed the psychic trail I left with Zero, didn't you."

"You will tell me where he is!"

"Fen, if we knew where he was... " Quatre sighed. Fen's eyes were on him. His own version of Zero would be showing him Quatre's lines, so the healer let his thoughts and conclusions ripple briefly across his mind for the other to see. He also allowed Fen to see Quatre's understanding of the situation, in a dance of probability and circumstance. The tendrils of the trap strewn around them, Duo's web snaring them both.

Fen suddenly slumped forward against Heero's hold. "Bastard," he muttered, but it sounded defeated.

"I'm sorry," Quatre whispered. Schism was starting to fade and he was getting emotional again. Fen's fractured mind and torn, bleeding soul were an almost physical pain. "I wish I could... I know it makes you angry - trust me, I know - but I'm afraid you have no other choice but to go along with it for now."

"Go along with what?" Trowa asked him quietly. The shaman's eyes were narrowed, he was also picking up the lines twisting around in the conversation, the decisions being made as he tried to follow. "You want him to join us?"

"I don't," Quatre said, rubbing his forehead. "I mean, we can do with the help, but this is coercion and we know it. It's Duo's plan. He's holding on to this man's soul, his memories, so that he can force Fen to fight Jusan when he gets here."

"Duo," Trowa muttered darkly.

"I... don't want-" Fen was shaking his head as if hoping to slip out of the chains he could feel settling around him. "Why should I help you?"

"Well you don't have to," Quatre pointed out. "You can just wait around in the sanctuary until Duo shows up. We're still not entirely certain what or who he is and what he wants, but a lot of his plans and attention seem to center around Heero."

"Heero?"

"The man holding you down. Er, Heero, you can let go of him now."

"So he'll come here," Fen said slowly, not noticing that Heero hadn't budged.

"Yes. We're not entirely sure, but we think he's trying to get us to fight Jusan. In which case he might make your help the price of giving you your Soul back. Heero, let him go."

"I'll kill him... " Fen murmured.

"I'm afraid that won't be an option. Duo... we don't know much about him, but I think he's powerful. Very powerful." Quatre let his knowledge and speculations flash across his mind's lines and saw Fen's eyes widen in response. "You see it? The way he affects the lines of the future? He's like a black hole in coming events, everything is spinning and falling towards him, he's a central figure. Duo is- Heero, let Fen go. He's on our side, well, sort of."

There was a small silence. The wind rustled the grass and whispered amongst the stones of the cirque behind them.

" ...Heero?"

"He attacked us." Heero's voice was cold and set.

"But...but that was because he thought we had his Soul Stone - it was a mistake, Heero." Quatre's eyes widened as he saw the curls of lines and the vectors of the immediate future. Fen sensed them as well and stiffened in Heero's steel hold. "Heero don't - he's not our enemy!"

"He is powerful," Heero said. "Finish talking to him. Then go away."

Quatre's mouth moved as if trying to shape the words that would stop what was coming. He could see it, understand it in a way. Heero didn't care why Fen had attacked them, he only cared that the man seemed to be an excellent fighter, a superb challenge, someone to hone his skills against. He was holding Fen because Quatre had asked him to. But the healer could see it, sense it, with his own empathy and Zero's foresight. Heero's directive of testing himself and building himself into a better warrior was very strong, as strong as whatever it was that was binding him to Quatre's will. Quatre had stopped him from killing the bandit shortly after they met, but that was because Heero had already defeated the man and was just cleaning up. Now the healer was fighting against something much more fundamental to Heero's...to Heero's very existence, Quatre realized, suddenly chilled to the bone.

"Now look here, bub-" Svale started menacingly, but Quatre stopped her. Arguments and commands wouldn't reach Heero on this, he had his own logic, his own drive. Quatre wasn't sure he could order or talk Heero down. But someone had to reach him.

"Trowa," he said softly, knowing who had the best chance of communicating with Heero now.

Trowa was silent for a few seconds. He was staring blindly at Fen, who was very, very still in Heero's grip as the clash of wills around him decided his fate. The shaman slowly lifted his head to stare straight at the enigmatic warrior he'd found at the end of his line a few months back.

"Fen is strong. You'd learn a lot fighting him. You would become even stronger," he told Heero matter-of-factly.

"Tro-" Quatre bit down his protest. No, he could see it, Trowa knew what he was doing. Quatre had to- he had to trust his lover. Hopefully the shaman had a better plan than egging Heero on.

Heero's blue eyes fastened on green.

"It won't do you much good though." Trowa's voice was neutral, almost uncaring, as if he hadn't actually noticed Heero was holding Fen in a grip that could easily become deadly if he said the wrong words. "Duo and I both told you, strength isn't always enough."

Heero started to scowl, a deadly look. Svale swallowed loudly, but no one else said anything.

"There's another way of becoming stronger." Trowa's voice was like flat ice covering deep dark pools and currents. "You can defeat Fen and add the very little this will teach you to your growing strength...or you can use his strength to complement your own, and increase it considerably."

Heero's eyes widened and he flinched. It was one of the strongest reactions Quatre had ever seen in him. "I- no."

"Why not?" Then Trowa seemed to catch himself, and continued on in the cold, neutral tones, ignoring his own question. "That's the way it works, Heero. I-... " The green eyes narrowed as if sensing another opening. "You use me and Quatre to make your way easier."

Quatre blinked at the statement. The whole 'conversation' sounded strange and disjointed, one affirmation following another with only tenuous logic, but he could feel it. Zero was showing the astounding effects of Trowa's simple words on Heero's psyche, the lines of Heero's mind quivering away from a concept that seemed abhorrent to him. Quatre felt a slight pity he could barely explain at his shiver of confusion...while Zero packed away yet more information about the mysterious man.

"I... you found me," Heero said as if this was a conclusive argument. It was apparent to Quatre that even Trowa didn't understand what Heero meant by that, but the shaman didn't press the point.

"You listen to us. You let us help you," Trowa continued relentlessly. "We are your friends, Heero. We stand by you and we cover for you. Quatre and I fought Fen when he pinned you to the wall. We helped kill him while you were helpless."

"Don't mind me," Fen muttered, eyes narrowing to slits. But he didn't add anything. He must have felt Heero flinch behind him.

"You... are the guide, in a fight you- you are a weakness," Heero said, but he sounded unsure of himself.

"True," Trowa said bluntly. "Duo used us to stalemate you. Quatre and I aren't very strong. Fen is much stronger. You can add that strength to your own. It's your choice."

"I can't... I..." Heero ducked his head and muttered something. It sounded like 'Heero Yuy'. The emotions roiling from him were hitting Quatre in the head like iron mallets. Frustration, confusion, an almost physical need for something, to achieve something, to become -Quatre bit down a groan, knowing that the next few seconds were crucial. The feelings overwhelming him and Zero's furious analyses were ripping him apart. He barely felt a hand, calloused from drawing back crossbow strings, slip into his, squeeze tightly. He drew some small comfort from it, but he couldn't allow himself to rely on- to lean on- he had to shy away from those emotions as well or they'd overwhelm him in his present state. This was too important. He freed his hand with a jerk and stared at Heero, willing the internal battle to go their way. It wasn't only Fen's life on the line. It was much more.

Come on, Heero. Get the concept. You may be strong, but you still need others. You can't-

He didn't know if it was Zero or sheer intuition that put the words in his mouth.

"You're the One and Only, but you still need us, Heero. You'll need others too before the end. Other friends to make you a better weapon. Let us help. Let us in."

Heero flinched. Then he released Fen and turned away abruptly.

Fen slowly got to his feet, rubbing his shoulders. Epyon rustled and started to slip back under his jacket like liquid metal.

"I think I might be called a temporary ally rather than a friend," he muttered.

"Don't confuse the issue," Quatre told him with a tight smile that indicated that it would be unwise to stress Heero further at this point. Fen glanced back at Heero, who was a few feet away with his back turned. Trowa was standing near him, a hand on his shoulder, saying a few words, nothing much but then Trowa didn't have to talk a lot to make his point, to make things clearer.

"You may be right," Fen muttered. "Why don't we go somewhere away from your interesting... friend and you can tell me a lot more about what the hell is going on here. I want to know everything there is to know about this Duo, as well as all of you people, and-"

"Later," Quatre said. He could barely feel his feet. He turned slowly, trying not to stumble. It came to him in a flash that he wouldn't mind Trowa's comforting hand on his own shoulder now. Pain ripped through him as he remembered shaking Trowa's hand away from his own a few minutes ago. It added to the growing pile of torment that was starting to stir, freed from Zero's chains. Zero itself, too busy calculating and analyzing what it had sensed from Heero, was not being any help.

"Later," Quatre said quietly, to avoid distracting Trowa. "I... need to go lie down for awhile. Talk to Svale, she can start to fill you in."

"Er-"

"If she tries to grope you, hit her. She'll generally take that as a no."

"Hey! Way to spoil my fun, Quatre!"

Quatre stumbled down the hill, towards the sanctuary of his room. He was going to pay for that little display this afternoon. He wanted to do it alone. Anything else might torment him past bearing.

 

Next Chapter: Weapons

Gearing up before the BCF (Big Crazy Fight)


	25. Weapons

Trowa said nothing as Quatre sat next to him on the chunk of stone, a relic of an old glacier that had rasped the ground into gentle rolling hills. The healer had approached and sat down as if he'd just happened to walk by and decided to rest with his lover. Since Trowa was about an hour's walk away from the Sanctuary in the middle of nowhere, this wasn't likely.

The shaman had just wanted to think, away from the sanctuary and its warping of nature that ached in his mind like an infection. Away from J and his insane, cruel plan, away from everyone who thought it wasn't such a bad idea, away from-...

"We need you to talk to Heero." Quatre did him the favor of not beating around the bush.

"To do what? To persuade him to do something that I think is a bad idea that will get him killed?"

"Yes," Quatre said with a shrug. "You're the only one who can really communicate with him"

Trowa stared at the hills undulating around them. He was at the crest of one of the higher ones. He could see plovers dart around a few bushes clinging to meager dark green slopes.

"Heero trusts me." Trowa went straight to the raw, open wound. "He trusts me, and you want me to betray him."

Quatre was silent for a few moments.

"J's plan-"

"Will kill him," Trowa interrupted harshly. "J wants him to sustain the power of Center while Svale uses it to create the shield. He'll be a conduit. Not only is that not something he'd agree to in a hurry, but that amount of power crashing through his body will kill him. And J knows it. He's just hoping Heero will survive long enough to allow Svale to cast the spell."

"Yes, J is expecting Heero to die." Quatre sounded so indifferent, removed from what he was saying. "But I don't think he will. Heero has his armor to help dominate the power surge. Wing has unexplored depths. So does Heero for that matter. Gaia, we hardly know anything about him except that he seems to be tougher than the planet herself. He might-"

"Might."

"Yes, he might die." Quatre's voice was still calm and analytical. "However, his chances of surviving a fight with the herald armed with Jusan's powers are nil. If it's Heero you're really worried about, then think of this as being in his best interest."

Trowa was silent for awhile. Gathering his words.

"Heero would have no problem at all dying at the hands of the herald," he finally said calmly.

For the first time, Quatre actually looked at him, a quick twitch of the eyes before fixing them on the hills straight ahead again. He hardly looks at us anymore, Trowa thought, numbed by the chronic pain; it's as if it is easier to look at the future than the present.

"You know this for a fact?" Quatre's voice lost a bit of its distance, sounding curious.

"Yes." Trowa didn't bother to explain. Maybe his vision of lines wasn't as... far-reaching as Zero's, or as complex. But what it showed him, he trusted. "Fighting is his way. Improving himself, shaping himself for... something. He cannot do this without risk, and he accepts it. He does not fear death in the pursuit of his... mission.

"You want me to persuade him to become a passive conduit for Center’s energy... it goes against everything he stands for. He'll just be a tool, it won't teach him anything. And what's more... We don't know how much this shield is going to cut down on Jusan's power. The herald will still be a very strong opponent. It will still be quite a fight, but Heero...will be dead. Or so drained and weakened he won't be able to lift a finger. You- J is asking him to stand down from the chance of facing the strongest opponent he'll ever meet, to instead be nothing but a component in a spell. And probably get killed in the process. Even if I could persuade him to do it, I don't think I should."

"So what's the plan? You'll try to be the conduit yourself?"

Trowa stiffened.

"J's smart,” Quatre continued. “He figured out I had the best chance of persuading you, like you have the best chance of persuading Heero, and he gave me all the ammunition he thinks I need. He told me about your offer to do it instead of Svale. He told me it will kill you and serve no purpose." Quatre scratched thoughtfully at a smooth patch of mica in the rock they were sitting on. Nearby, the roan horse huffed and stamped as a plover dipped down the crest of the hill.

Trowa closed his eyes. Then he opened them again, though he didn't look at his lover.

"Thank you," he said softly.

Quatre's idle scratching of the mica stopped. " ...For what?" Trowa almost smiled at the slight puzzlement in the voice that used to murmur his name when they-... looked like even Zero could occasionally have a hard time predicting him.

"For not trying to manipulate me."

Quatre leaned his chin on his fist, elbow on his knee, and followed the plover with his eyes. No, he was following the plover's path before the bird had even taken it.

"I don’t need to. I know you'll do what's right for Center in the end. Even if that does mean you'll betray a friend." Something in Trowa's chest flinched. "If it helps... "

Quatre's voice was suddenly soft and there was something there that predated Zero. "If it helps, I think Heero will survive. And this will make him stronger, in ways neither of you can imagine. I think...I think this may be part of why he was at the end of your line, Trowa. Not just to fight Jusan or his herald...there's more. I just can't put my finger on it." Quatre sighed. It was a human sound, and a bit lost, and Trowa ached.

"Quatre... "

"No."

"What?"

"We can't have this conversation now."

"Why not?!" Trowa surged to his feet and spun to stand in front of his lover. Who looked right through him. "Quatre, we have to talk about this! I'm worried- I... what you said, when Fen attacked- we have to-"

"We don't have the time."

"What do you mean we don't have the time!" Trowa snapped, gesturing at the empty hills around them. "We're all alone, there's no insane recently-murdered guy attacking us, the herald is still weeks away, and I-"

"We're out of time. We were out of time yesterday."

Trowa stared at the healer. Quatre was looking straight ahead still. But his eyes were darting rapidly as if he was seeing something complex unfold in front of him.

"What do you mean?" Trowa said, realizing he had to drag Quatre out of his contemplation to get any further information.

The eyes darted towards him, he felt himself neatly slotted into place in the tapestry his lover's eyes were weaving.

"It will take you a few hours to persuade Heero to do this. Then Svale needs to prepare him. The purification rituals alone take three days. There's stuff he needs to know, or he won't stand a chance, and you know he'll never let Svale teach him. You'll be needed for that, we won't have time to talk. But with all that...All calculated...at the very best estimate, the herald will be here nearly a day before Heero can be ready to cast the spell."

" ...Doesn't that mean we're screwed?" Trowa felt light-headed.

"Well...maybe." Quatre frowned. His eyes darted faster and faster, and he grasped his hands together under his chin, but not before the shaman noticed they were trembling. "I... there are two big variables here that are pretty much ending the lines' deployment at the herald's arrival. One is Heero's strength. How much power he can channel at once, meaning how fast the power potential can reach the point needed to start the resonance."

"What's the other?" Trowa asked when Quatre was silent for a minute.

"I don't know," Quatre said reluctantly. The eye movements had slowed and he sighed. "There's something here...Zero is feeling something, in the lines of fate and the calculation of probabilities. Something huge and unseen...and I wouldn't be surprised it had to do with Duo."

"Duo!" Trowa's fists clenched. Then he frowned. "Could this be Duo dragging Fen into the fight? Blackmailing him with this stone he apparently stole-"

"No, I've already used Fen in my calculations," Quatre said with precision. "He'll help us slow the herald down. Give us some time-"

"Quatre, no one can slow the herald down once Jusan has been summoned."

"That's... another factor... I... " Quatre rubbed his eyes. "I can't explain. There's a plan here - beyond ours - and we're all helpless links in its chain of events. But getting Heero to cooperate is an essential step, and one that will save us all. It's up to you." Quatre stood abruptly and turned. For the briefest moment a flicker of something like pain, compassion, love darted through blue eyes as they passed over Trowa. Then it was gone and Quatre was walking down the hill. "I'll leave you the horse. At this point, any minute saved might mean the difference between the complete destruction of Center and her salvation. I'll walk, it'll do me good. There's not much more I can do at this juncture."

"Quatre-"

"After."

"What?" Trowa took a few steps down the hill to catch Quatre's voice as he walked away.

"After we defeat the herald - assuming we're still alive. We'll talk then. If you want to."

"Yeah. I'll want to," Trowa muttered, his eyes on the figure halfway down the hill. He shook his head and ran to the roan.

I'm sorry, Heero. Maybe this will be for your own good, or maybe it will kill you. I can hope Quatre is right and that you will survive this and become even stronger... But I am dedicated to Center. I know what I must do. 

 

\---

The light blinked on... blinked off... blinked on... nice not to think...

"Um... my lord?"

Oh for fuck's sake!

"Don't call me that!" Wufei snarled and the man took an actual leap back as if he'd been bitten.

Wufei turned sharply back to stare at the console. The blinking light no longer held the ability to distract him from his thoughts.

He could hear the minion lick his lips nervously beside him. "Do... did you want to eat-"

"No."

"V-very well-"

"How much longer until we arrive -" Wufei scowled. He'd already asked the question today. Twice. It had still slipped from him, his impatience defeating his control.

"Er, another five days, my- er, s-sir."

"Good." Wufei shifted in the command chair. The ether-ripper was small; sleek, fast and powerful, its exterior and interior as streamlined as possible. Wufei and the crew were thrown into close proximity, much to his annoyance and their distress. He had his own cabin... but the image of a High Dragon skulking there when he was in command of this small force made him want to bite someone for real.

He could almost feel it...Jusan was being wise, and forbearing to comment, but he was there. Curling in Wufei's mind like a snake. Why did I agree to this...?

Wing. In five days he would be on Center, he would find this Heero, he would dismember him and take Wing from the carcass. And then-

And then...

Wufei caught his hand as he was about to rub his eyes viciously. The three-man flight crew of the 'ripper were on the command deck below his chair, and Bluch was standing just outside the door, glaring at the hallway he guarded, or possibly trying to use the few neurones the gods had given them, lost within the muscle he had between his ears, to remember to keep breathing. Why had Jusan given him this-this primitive as the CO of his guard detail? Why did he have a guard detail at all?! 

It was to guard the ship while he was away, he knew - he could almost feel Jusan about to give him the answer. The Scourge was a continual light presence in his mind. When - in what he considered to be a moment of pure, distilled madness and despair - he'd agreed to become the creature's herald, Jusan had created a mental link between them, just one more insult to Wufei's integrity.

The link could be called upon at a moment's notice. Wufei jerked fitfully at the chain around his neck, the tiny links chaffing his skin. The pendant he never, ever touched clinked gently against Shenlong beneath the cloth of his white tunic. The small metal disk was a spell, materialized by Jusan's will. He could use it to summon the Scourge and let the tenuous link between them open like a floodgate, burying who he was...

It was understood that Wufei would not do this unless absolutely necessary. It went without saying; they had that much of an understanding. It... twisted deep inside Wufei. That despite the conditions he'd imposed and the opposition he'd put up about this herald business, Jusan had still preferred to use him than any other soldier under his command. It was true that Wufei could stand a lot more power than any other creature available to Jusan, he was the natural choice, but the Scourge could have used his powers to increase a servant's strength to stand some of his might. He did not have to use a cantankerous, unwilling Dragon... Wufei felt that in Jusan's twisted view of the world, making Wufei his puppet was some kind of honor he was bestowing on his future war leader, and the whole thing just made Wufei want to gut someone.

The pendant clinked against Shenlong again. And that was another thing! Wufei's mind gladly seized upon this new source of annoyance, because this was something he could stay decently mad about without any kind of unwanted subtext. Damn the Scourge! Wufei had wanted Shenlong repaired properly! But once he'd agreed to this herald nonsense, Jusan couldn't get him out the door fast enough. He’d regrown the Gundanium at a speed that still ached in Wufei’s bones days later, but it was a mere patch job. Fortunately Wufei knew what he was doing - one of the rare High Dragons who knew how to fix and wire Scale, not just wear it - and he was spending a good part of this down time, as much as his strength could spare, in reworking, rewiring and rerouting functions to optimize the build. It wouldn’t be finished by the time he hit Center again, but it’d do. The Gundanium was all there and energized, but just the armor. Blasted Jusan hadn’t had the time to work on any weapons, of course not. Wufei’s broken weapons were still on Libra, the Scourge had promised to “have a look”, though they couldn’t be fully repaired without their owner present. Wufei snarled silently, his face hidden behind his fist as he slouched in the command chair. If he let himself believe that this was deliberate, that Jusan was using this method to insure that Wufei would return to him once this Heero was dead, once he had Wing...though he'd have the greater armor he would no more be able to leave Shenlong unfinished than he'd be able to abandon a brother wounded in combat, and the Scourge probably knew it, But damn it all - Wufei had given him his word he'd return! Jusan could have taken a few more days to repair the weapons too, he did not need an extra noose around Wufei's neck, a leash, to drag him back and-

Light... blinking on... .off... on... .calm down... concentrate on getting Wing... after that...

Wufei shied away from this thought as well. Not in anger this time. There was something strange, he-... he just couldn't... see it. Wufei went through life like a ballistic missile, always sure of his path. He had the determination to rip Center from crust to core to find this Heero and get Wing off him and then-...

Nothing.

It was a bit strange. He just couldn't see what he'd be doing after that. Well, he knew of course what he'd be doing, he thought hastily, as much to reassure himself as the silent presence in his mind, unsure of how much Jusan could sense/read his thoughts or interfere with them. After he got Wing, he would return to Libra, get Shenlong fully fixed, then either find a Dragon worthy of wearing one or the other of the high armor - hah, as if that would happen - or train some up to be his successor. Preferably young children, so they could learn. Two heirs, one for Shenlong, one for Wing. They did not have to be Dragons by birth. If they could prove themselves worthy, if they accepted his teachings, his way, then they would become the seeds of the Dragon's rebirth (under Jusan's supervision, of course... )

A future, a hope... why couldn't he see any of this?

Was he going to die? Was that why the future seemed shut to him, non-existent once he met Heero again? Was his intuition telling him he'd be joining them soon?

Every time he tried to think too deeply about these things, his mind would just stop. Like his thoughts were falling into a dark, bottomless pit. Best to stop thinking about this, he didn't like Jusan sensing his discomfort. But he wished...He wished he could feel entirely certain that this was really the correct course to take, because something just didn't feel quite right.

Wufei stood abruptly. The three men in the command deck flinched even though he was several feet away. He'd been in rather a bad mood these past two days, and there was nothing in the galaxy quite as unpleasant as a Dragon in a bad mood, particularly one Chang Wufei.

"I'll be in my cabin, working on my Scale. Call me if you clowns manage to get us into trouble you can't get us out of again," he snapped and left, closing the door on an almost palpable feeling of relief that swept the ether-ripper's cockpit. 

\---

Quatre climbed the final hill with a sigh. He'd opted to walk back because Trowa had just been about to realize they could both ride back together and talk on the horse without wasting any time. Quatre had jerked the lines of thought and intent and walked away before the thought could fully form in his lover's mind.

They could all be dead next week. He just wanted...he just wanted his last memories of his lover to not be a bitter argument. Trowa would be busy from now on. Quatre would be as well, working with Fen and the wardens to plan on slowing down the herald.

He could see Trowa in the distance as he cut across the sanctuary. The shaman was in the cirque, arguing with Heero, with Svale jumping up and down and adding a useless counterpoint. Heero had his arms crossed over his chest and a mulish look on his face, Quatre could see it despite the distance. Trowa would be at it for a few more hours of beating against this resistance before it would crumble.

The next five days played out in Quatre's mind, the most likely events, the highlights, a few finer details twisting like branches from the tree of their common fate. The argument between the two lovers did not feature anywhere in the upcoming future. Something else would happen though, if Quatre had his say. Trowa had been kind and patient and waited for Quatre to give him some form of permission to touch him, to get near him; knowing how disturbing the visions from Zero could be when Quatre touched another human body. Well, Quatre could control Zero a bit better now, and chances were one or the other or both would be dead in five days. So tonight, and the next night, hell, every night until the herald arrived...the shaman had better remember to take his clothes off before going to bed or he'd be down a set of leathers again.

Weak, whispered the part of Quatre that had adapted to Zero.

I need this!

Useless. I should be conserving my strength.

He is my strength...

Pathetic. He might be dead soon. What will I do then, crumble? Give up? I need to be strong.

If he dies, I'll die too. Every hour of every day for the rest of my life, I'll die too. But I'll keep on fighting. So give me this. Please. Just give me this.

"You might want to stop now."

Quatre jerked back to the present, away from the argument in his mind, just as he was about to walk into a rock. He glanced around wildly. Fen was sitting on the doorstep to the small underground lair he'd opted to sleep in last night. The Phoenix, since that was what he claimed to be, had declined an offer of a more comfortable room in the main compound that Svale had made habitable when she moved into the sanctuary. Fen didn't trust them entirely yet.

"I'd tell you to pull up a chair, but I'm afraid I don't have any," Fen said. "Pull up a bit of ground, and sit down."

Quatre hesitated, then approached the man slowly. Fen was... in Quatre's own divided state, Fen was both easy and difficult to talk to. Easy because their words were only bridges to get their Zeros to tune, and then they could swap concepts that could fit in several encyclopedias, all in a few seconds and gestures. Difficult because it felt alien to share this with someone; Quatre had gotten used to his isolation. Used to not having someone understand him, judge him... try to reach him.

Fen was doing it now. Looking at him as if he could see the lines of the fracture running up and down Quatre's mind as the healer sat down.

"You're remarkably intact, actually,” Fen said.

Quatre slumped slightly, in relief/unease and glanced at Fen, a question.

"No, I didn't have quite this bad a time adapting to Zero, as far as I can remember - try to talk, Winner. I know it feels slow to us, but it focuses you. And if you don't... if you don't, you might forget how to." Fen's eyes flicked towards the distant cirque, towards Trowa who was making placating gestures at a now visibly furious Heero. There was a question/argument in that glance, a twitch in Fen's lines as his Zero probed Quatre. The healer shrugged off the remark - and batted Zero away easily. What was between him and Trowa was their own business.

Quatre glanced at Fen's chest where Epyon curled under cloth, full of potential violence. Then the healer bit his lip and vocalized the question.

"Was it because you had Epyon? To help you? Was that why it was easier for you?"

Zero layered the question with subtext and meaning and hints and arguments like an unheard chorus, but Fen was right; the words felt plodding and slow yet they grounded him. Quatre relaxed slightly.

"Yes. In part." Fen was looking at him carefully. Thoughts darted across his mind and body, tiny gestures readable to Quatre, answering the question and adding details that could not be expressed into words. "The...man I was before... " Fen scowled and Quatre flinched as he felt Fen's mind twist in the howling wind of eons, thousands of memories that ripped at him and-

"Fen!"

"S-sorry." Fen rubbed his head and glared at the dirt. "Damn that Shi No Kami. Yasso... Sessno yaat-"

"Fen."

"Sorry. Er... Where was I?"

"You were talking about how you dealt with Zero. Why you used Epyon," Quatre reminded him gently.

"Oh right. I was? Why were we talking about that?"

Quatre sighed. Most of the time, Fen was nothing but a young man with a deadly mecha and a lot of questions about who he was and how he fit in to the events rushing them all towards Armageddon. Occasionally though he'd lose himself in one of his past memories, which outnumbered the few recollections he had of his present life like the stars outnumbered a single human existence. In fact it was quite remarkable that he wasn't a complete gibbering wreck.

 

"I think you were worrying about me," Quatre said with some irony.

"Oh that's right. Yes. I chose to meld Zero with Epyon and not myself to keep some distance between my thought processes and its own while still being able to use it. Besides it's an instrument of war, it seemed appropriate." A flick of Fen's hand and thoughts indicated just how inappropriate it was to see Zero melded to the heart, mind and soul of a healer. Quatre's lips narrowed, in anger/grief/protest, it wasn't-

"Use words, Winner."

"Dammit, I didn't choose this!" Quatre burst out. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure Trowa was still in the cirque behind them, some distance away. Heero was now sitting on a stone, his shoulders set in a hostile line but visibly listening. If Trowa ever heard Quatre say this, his response would be immediate. Get rid of it then!

"Do you think... " Quatre sighed. He could ask Fen. The man had a Zero himself, could measure the risks, and above all, didn't care for Quatre one way or another, so would give him a completely honest and objective answer. "Do you think I should follow Duo's original plan? He wanted me to only carry Zero, and then have the others imprint it into Wing. Do you think I should get rid of it and -"

"Gods no. Though I wouldn't let your boyfriend hear me say it." Fen was following all of Quatre's train of thoughts in a rather disconcerting manner. "I'll be honest with you, Winner. Zero was meant for a Jishin of very high intellectual and magical capacities. You're an exceptional young man to have been able to integrate it and control it so far. Quite remarkable. It's still going to kill you or drive you insane. That's the most likely outcome." Fen shrugged indifferently. "But Zero is needed in this battle against Juusan. I'm using my own to control Epyon and avoid going completely nuts. It's taken over some of the functions of my Soulstone in keeping my mind whole. As such, I can't use it as a weapon of war, it's too busy. And you people, well, all of us, we'll need someone who can deploy a strategy and give us an edge in the coming fight. And that person is not Heero. To be perfectly honest, the thought of Heero and Zero together make me-... " He shuddered, and his Zero flipped a few speculations through his mind. Quatre gave a sympathetic shiver.

"Even if you put Zero in Wing, and not Heero's mind... in his present state it would still overwhelm him. The result would be explosive."

"In his present state?" Quatre tried to catch the thread of speculation that had flickered in Fen's mind when he'd said that.

"He's very young."

The healer hadn't been expecting that, even with Zero!

"Heero? Young? He's older than I am! And as tough as-"

"He's younger than you," Fen corrected him as if it was obvious. "In some ways he's like a child."

"You wouldn't say that if you'd seen him kill," Quatre muttered.

"I did. I saw him kill me half a dozen times during our fight, in my visions of the future, through Zero. He's a vicious, determined, unemotional killer and he has the heart of a small child under all that steel. He would not be able to control Zero in his present state. Maybe if he matured, changed... but right now it would consume him. Duo was wrong - or didn't care what effects it would have, as long as it made Heero ready to fight Jusan. Maybe... " Fen's eyes narrowed in speculation. Then fell on Quatre.

"Let's get something to eat, Winner. I'm starving. Then we need to talk. We need to develop some strategies to counter this herald. Even if he doesn't summon Juusan, a full-grown High Dragon with a grudge is likely to be very frisky. And we need to talk about this Shi No Kami. I think we both have ideas. Maybe if we can put them together we can figure out what the bastard wants."

"Okay." Quatre's eyes wandered towards the distant hills that were starting to nibble at the sun's edge. "But I...I want to go to bed early tonight."

Fen opened his mouth to object - then his eyes darted off towards the cirque, where Trowa was sitting next to Heero, their heads together while Svale patted the warrior's knee in a gesture that was comforting and almost totally devoid of carnal interest. Ice-blue eyes flickered over the shaman's lean frame.

"I see," Fen said with a faint smile. "Don't need Zero for that as a matter of fact."

Quatre scowled, using his newly-won control to eliminate the faint blush that was trying to stain his cheeks. From the way Fen chuckled, it was a wasted effort. Even Zero couldn't change some things it seemed.

 

\---

 

Next Chapter: Five Threads Of Fate Weave Together

Five cute guys meet. At Mach 5 velocity.


	26. Five Threads Of Fate Weave Together

"This is fucking insane. You know that? Sit here."

"... "

"Oh stand if you want. Trust me, you'll wish you were sitting down soon."

"... "

"I love a man of few words! You do know, gorgeous, that serving as the conduit will take a lot out of you. Leave you quite exhausted actually."

"... "

"But that's okay! Ol' Svale will be glad to nurse ya back to health! You know what, handsome? Sponge baths are my specialty!"

"... "

"What does it take to get a rise out of you, kid? Come on, tell me. I'm taking notes."

"... "

"Why do you bother, Svale?" Quatre's clear voice carried over the stones of the cirque.

Svale left Heero in the circle she'd scratched into the ground with her staff. It didn't look like much, but it didn't have to; it was as pregnant with power as a loaded gun, and Heero was standing in the barrel.

The old crone bounced over to Quatre, planted her staff between two stones and scrambled up so she could stare into his eyes.

"Remind me why this is such a brilliant plan again?" she hissed.

Quatre looked through her - he knew that annoyed her and worried her, but there was too much at stake to cater to her concerns. He had to keep his eyes on the lines twisting like whips, lashing at their future.

The cirque was one of three in the sanctuary. They were at optimal distance apart, in a loose triangle, two beneath ground and one above. When the power rang between the three of them, it would create a wave that would resonate throughout the planet's crust, propagate to the magnetic field and set up the spell project by the Source beneath the sanctuary. All it needed was a power source strong enough to make the whole thing ring.

Center had enough power. But it was scattered all across her. Svale's ring - despite looking like a crude sketch of an octagon done by a six-year-old - had the ability to gather it. But a human mind had to concentrate it, pool it until it could be unleashed, or it would dissipate as soon as it was gathered.

"Look, Quatre," Svale ground out. "I'm taking you on your word when you say Heero'll survive-"

"Might survive."

"But it's the other bit I'm worried about. Stopping the Dragon from turning us all into chopped liver while Heero gathers the energy for the spell."

Quatre shrugged, although it was true that that part was still a mystery to him too. "Fen should be powerful enough to slow him down."

"But not if the Dragon summons Jusan! Then nothing could slow him down short of a black hole up the butt," Svale countered, her wrinkled old face creasing even more with worry.

"Master S tells us that the herald has been on the planet for the last three hours. So far he's not summoned Jusan," Quatre pointed out.

"Nothin' indicates that this blissful state of affairs will continue once we start collecting Center's energy. Some of it will bleed off into the cirque while Heero's gathering it. I did my best to insulate the circle, but it's inevitable. It will cause a few reactions in the cirque. That kind of power gathering will stand out like a troll at a leprechaun convention. Jusan will know we're up to something, and he'll be able to pinpoint our location. He'll order his herald to cast the summoning spell and then he'll obliterate the planet."

"I... think not."

"Oh good."

"But he will send his herald here to kill Heero and stop us."

"Oh bad."

They were both silent for a spell. Svale stared at him blankly. "Quatre... do you really think Fen has the power to stop the Dragon?"

"I don't know. Too many variables. Let's go see if Heero is ready and take our posts." 

Quatre walked slowly towards Heero, cutting the conversation short. Svale leaped down from her staff and ran right up to the warrior for a good-luck grope - hopping right over the crude line in the dirt to glomp his leg.

"Svale!" Quatre stared at the scuffed line. "Your circle -" He ducked as Svale passed over his head in a gentle curve. Heero must be worried about all this too, Quatre thought absently. That was nowhere near the strength of his normal Svale-hurl.

Svale was back on her feet with a bounce, as unhurt as if Heero had struck the planet's core with a wet towel. Being a warden had some advantages.

"Be careful of the circle," Quatre said weakly as Svale looked ready to make another attempt at a goodbye hug.

"What, this thing?" Svale tapped the line in the dirt with the end of her staff she'd picked up. "It's nothing special, kid. Just a bulls-eye, so Center knows where to drop the load."

"Oh, okay. No, Svale, leave Heero alone. He needs to concentrate."

"Oh all right." Svale was looking at him from the corner of her eye. He wondered if he was going to get a goodbye tackle as well, and got a small fraction of Zero ready to read the lines along which he should dodge.

"Say, Quatre... this Dragon... you say he's going to be coming here as soon as he feels Heero start the spell, right?"

"That's the most likely outcome, yes. Jusan will want him to stop Heero from-"

"Is he hot?"

" ...I beg your pardon?" Quatre had been sifting through the lines around Heero, trying, despite knowing it was impossible, to see the strands of the young warrior's fate, to get that little bit of assurance he hadn't condemned his friend to death. But Svale's question effectively derailed his thoughts.

"Hot! Cute! Is he delicious! Beddable! A hunk! A hottie! A-"

"Why on earth do you want to know that?" Quatre felt like his eyes were going to pop out of his skull.

"Well is he, or not?!"

"I don't know - I guess he's good-looking but... I only saw him for a minute and I was busy with - why on earth does it matter whether he is hot or not?!"

"Just want to make sure he's not breaking my lucky streak of gorgeous guys that keep popping up to see me. Besides it'd be a shame to get killed by someone ugly."

Quatre was left with his mouth open... and a very intense vision - not involving Zero one bit - of the arrogant young man he vaguely remembered, being treated to the full fury of Svale's kind of greeting. The horrified Dragon in his mind was trying to shake Svale off of his leg only to have her latch on to his torso, and Quatre had to repress a chuckle.

"So he's still there."

Quatre blinked, to find Svale up her staff at eye-height to him, looking into his face with the wisdom of one who has seen too many winters.

"Wh-what?"

"There's still a bit of Rabbit in there. I'm glad. Don't get dead, kid. I hate funerals."

She was gone before he could answer. He stared at the diminutive form rocketing across the cirque. He hadn't realized... she'd been calling him Quatre for days now.

Maybe there was a message there; don't get so lost in the future you forget to look at the present, because you can lose track of what's actually happening, and pay the price. A fact she'd adequately demonstrated, Quatre realized with a grimace as he rubbed the spot where the old bat had managed to pinch his buttocks while he'd been distracted.

Quatre turned towards Heero. He was standing in the crude circle with his usual lack of expression and his arms crossed on his chest. Not for the first time, the healer wondered what could possibly be going through his mind.

"Good luck, Heero," he whispered - knowing it was neither required nor wished for, but wanting to say it anyway. Then he walked away to take up his position. He, Fen and Trowa had to protect Heero from the Dragon who had already tried to kill him once. When Heero started acting as the conduit to Centre's power, he'd be vulnerable.

Quatre rifled the strands of the future in his mind. He hadn't told Svale - hadn't told anybody - that at present there was no way the three of them could stop the Dragon for any length of time. The warrior bearing Shenlong would kill them all before Heero had a chance to complete the spell. Unless something else happened. Quatre felt pretty confident something would, though he didn't think he was going to like it.

Then there were the two other pressing questions; if, by some miracle, they were actually able to oppose the Dragon successfully, what would stop the herald from summoning Jusan to obliterate them all? It was strange the herald had not done so already. Zero was baffled by this, it went against all logical and tactical data. An indication that something was missing in his information.

And of course there was the other big question. The one Quatre and Fen had thought of, but carefully kept to themselves.

The spell was going to resonate throughout the core, amplifying the shield spell from the Source beneath the sanctuary. Once cast, it would stop the Dragon summoning Jusan, cutting the link between them. If the Scourge came here in person, it would eliminate a considerable amount of his power. That was all good. But the shield had a weakness; the Source that generated the spell had to exist and continue casting the spell that resonated throughout Center. Jusan might realize this. So even if, as unlikely as it seemed, the sanctuary's defenders managed to slow down the Dragon enough to allow Heero to cast the spell, and stop Jusan's summoning...

...what would stop the powerful Dragon from obliterating sanctuary and Source all together, as well as a weakened Heero, thus destroying the newly-cast shield and opening the gates to total destruction?

 

Good luck.

Heero processed the words.

Either an empty expression meant to indicate that Quatre did not wish him to die. Or an actual form of spell. Considering that Quatre had a powerful tool at his disposal now, allowing him to see the future and shape it, the best conclusion was the latter. Heero nodded firmly at Quatre's departing back. He didn't need any magic, but it couldn't hurt. Maybe it would help.

That was what Trowa had been telling him. It was... an alien concept. Well most things were alien to Heero since his beginning. But this one was even more alien than most and struck at the very core of Heero's universe.

Letting... people... help him.

The why and wherefores of people helping him were beyond Heero like quantum physics were beyond a beetle. He was already struggling with the first part of the concept. Letting people help him.

The world had been simple to start with. Trowa had been The Guide. As long as he followed Trowa, he would find his purpose. He never questioned that. Quatre had been an addition to Trowa. He'd understood the first time he'd seen them together that they functioned as something of a unit. There was a bond between them that went much further than flesh (though he'd categorized sex as part of that). It meant that one without the other would be much less. He had been satisfied when Quatre had been given the weapon. He had seen the healer evolve, change. Become stronger. It was the nature of things, and Heero had approved. He had to protect The Guide until he reached his goal, and this strengthening of part of that unit could only make that easier.

Apart from the Guide, everybody else on Center was either a negligible entity or target practice.

That easy.

The world, it turned out, was full of strange creatures and situations that made it a lot less easy than he first thought.

_There's more to fighting and winning a war than being the strongest... we would be so much stronger together..._

Duo's words played in his mind. He remembered every gesture, every intonation, the slight lift of the lips, the gleam in the blue eyes - Heero remembered everything that ever happened to him perfectly, and would not have believed anyone who told them this was unusual. The concept of forgetting was one of many that were a closed book to him; actually, in this and many other matters, Heero didn't even know his way to the library.

He didn't know the extent of his ignorance. If he had, it would not have worried him. Knowledge of such things was not necessary to the mission.

What Duo had said, however... and what Trowa had explained to him...

Friends. To complement your own strength, use the strength of others you can trust. Trust being defined by what Trowa or Quatre said. They were The Guide after all. If they led somewhere, he had to follow, or risk losing them.

Of course his guides didn't really know where they were going; they weren't supposed to. They would lead him, all unknowingly, from one danger to the next, from one lesson to the next, until they reached their goal and Heero was strong enough to finish the mission.

Heero, who knew what lay at the end of the mission, felt... a touch of emotion when he thought of that. Emotions were also something he'd been struggling with, along with the concept of friend. They were supposed to guide him too; anger gave him an edge. Unease told him when a danger was perhaps too great for his growing strength, indicating he should back off. Hunger and thirst reminded him to take care of his body. That easy.

Well, emotions, like the world, had turned out to be somewhat more complex than he'd been led to believe.

He didn't know what to do with this new emotion that clenched his throat whenever he thought of the future, the end of the mission, and what it meant for Trowa and Quatre. It felt like unease... but it was not related to any threat to Heero. He... didn't know.

This didn't bother him. If he didn't know, then it was probably not related to the mission. If it was, he'd figure it out sooner or later. That was the way it worked.

One thing he felt no anxiety about was the task the Guide had appointed to him today. He didn't understand the looks they were giving him; actually, the looks seemed to match his strange emotion that haunted him when he thought of the future, but they seemed to feel it for him, now. Trowa had told him he had a good chance of dying.

Heero shook his head ever so softly. The Guide could really be blind.

This wouldn't kill Heero. It was what he'd been made for. Or, if it did kill him, then the mission was a failure before it had ever really truly started.

It was why he had agreed to this. He hadn't been worried about this conduit thing, but he had wanted to fight that strange, powerful young man who had attacked him before. Especially if he had become stronger still. Now that would be something worth doing.  
But, in the end, it would only add a bit to his strength. Which had been all he'd ever thought about until Fen and Duo had shown him how creatures less strong than himself could still neutralize him.

Trowa said the Dragon had something - Heero hadn't bothered with the details - that could defeat them all. Some kind of spell that could not be fought, could not be parried, that would make Heero's strength useless.

It made him curious to find out what it was, but he had to trust the Guide. He could fight this herald after he'd countered this spell, and for that he needed to become a conduit for Center’s power.

Trowa had been surprised he's agreed so quickly, but Heero considered this practice. A way of testing himself, judge how ready he was for the final step of the mission.

"We're about to start, handsome!"

Heero ignored her. He always did. She was one of those things in the world that just didn't fit. He knew a lot about her. He knew her real name - which wasn't Svale. He knew how old she was - it was considerably more than five hundred and sixty five years. He knew some of her purpose - which didn't really jibe with the way she acted. But despite all he knew about her, she was strange beyond anything he could imagine and he didn't like it when she touched him. He kept ignoring her or hitting her, which should have been a good way of getting her to leave him alone, but somehow it had not worked yet.

"The others are in place. Listen, people can come in and out of the circle, like I did earlier; it's not a barrier, it won't protect you. But you can't leave it or you will interrupt the connection and disperse the energy. You got that? Yeah? Lift one eyebrow for yes, two for no... You're one big pain in the ass, boy. Okay, here it comes."

Heero forced himself to relax. He knew what to expect from being a conduit, and he did not fear it. His emotions, his notion of self, were not developed enough to let him be anxious about this. He didn't fear his own extinction, the displacement of his mind by Center - temporarily if what Trowa said was true - which would make him non-existent. That was what being a conduit meant, at least in Heero's knowledge and that was considerable. He also knew it would be excruciatingly painful, at least until the displacement had occurred. The pain might drive him to his knees, though, mulishly, he decided to test his own strength by seeing if he could remain standing until the process was complete.

He let his arms hang loose, his neck relaxed, his eyes drifted close.

Then he opened them again.

He should have known the weird old creature would screw this up. He turned to glare at her.

The crone was sitting on the dirt with her short legs stretched out before her like a child, her staff leaning to one side, looking at him expectantly. And there was a slight light glowing around her.

Heero blinked.

Not just around her... 

He turned, eyes widening. Every sparse blade of grass that had managed to invade the barren cirque was glowing, gentle phosphorescence like a halo. And... Heero stared. He could see every ant, beetle, worm lurking in the grass. Being who he was, Heero was always aware of any entity around him. But normally his mind was bent to his mission, and it would focus on what was essential; signs of danger, or something to fight and kill. Now however...

Heero's eyes widened...

...He could see it all... all at once... Svale and the beetles and the blades of grass, and everything beyond, slowly rising into his consciousness, it was all there, and it was all just as important, just as crucial to the whole.

Heero swayed... this-this wasn't how it was supposed to be. It was supposed to be painful-

And the whole of it was there; a tapestry that was unfolding in front of his mind's eyes. He'd seen it before, distantly, but he'd only ever concentrated on what mattered. But he...he had never realized that it _all_ mattered, and it was all...

Slowly, he sank to his knees...

...it was all...

...beautiful...

"Told you you'd be better off sitting down," Svale whispered, but her voice was kind (part of the pattern too, all part of - ) and she got up and left, and Heero continued to stare at the endless, graceful cycles; beautiful cruelty, earthy kindness, death and life turning like ever repeating wheels. The wheel turns, that was what Trowa meant when he said that. Death, life...there seemed to be a lot of sex involved too. And it all revolved and turned and...

Heero's eyes widened further...

...He'd always assumed it would not include him. He was utterly alien to it after all. Yet somehow...

The energy from the many, many cycles around him started to trickle into the circle as he opened his soul to them.

...Somehow Center didn't mind that he was not part of her patterns. She was quite willing to use him, adopt him, integrate him, touch him... welcome him ...embrace him as one of her own, as part of the whole...

Heero didn't notice Svale leave in silence. Nor did he notice the ship, shaped like a large blade, landing a few hundred meters to the south.

 

Wufei leaned against the console, staring at the haphazard heap of stones strewn about a few hills in front of the ether-ripper.

"Looks like a temple," the brute - Wufei's first officer - said slowly.

"It's Jishin." Wufei's eyes were darting over the different viewscreens showing the hills and mounds. Huge sanctuary, he’d never seen one this big. But in ruins.

"Jishin?" The brute's forehead wrinkled into a frown, perhaps in an attempt to roll whatever synapses he had together. "Them's magic users. Dangerous ones."

"Only if you're afraid of ghosts," Wufei sneered, a cruel smile twisting his lips. "Jusan wiped the damn Tricksters from the face of the galaxy almost a decade ago. Hey you." The co-pilot flinched. "This place doesn't look like much. You sure you directed us to the right area?"

//Yes//

Shut up! I wasn't talking to you!

"Yes sir. The magical emanations Lord Jusan told us about definitely originated here." The co-pilot pointed at a strange assembly that looked half like a radar and half like a clepsydra full of quicksilver - some kind of mana reader. Wufei was aggressively disinterested in anything that had to do with magic and that included the voice in his head.

//Yes, yes, we all know how you feel about the link between us.// Jusan said shortly. //But now is when you need my help.//

I am not summoning you! I told you that when we landed on Center. Hell, I told you before I even left the Libra! I'm only summoning you if they try some stupid magic against me. Otherwise I'll fight my own battles. 

//If you let them cast the shield you won't have any choice. The link between us will be severed and you will be helpless in the face of magic.//

My race fought many magic users - including the damn Jishin while they were still around! Magic is no more dangerous than any other weapon to a warrior who knows himself.

//I admire your confidence, but I'd rather not put it to the test. And you don't have much time to avoid it. Do you see that light over there? In the circle at the top of the central hill?//

"No." Wufei ignored the startled look the pilots gave him.

//No? Good grief, Chang, I'm using your eyes and _I_ can see it. Does it take you much of an effort to be this close-minded about the magical, or is it a gift?//

"Shut. Up."

//I'm afraid that's not an option now. They've started gathering the energy to cast the spell. Apparently they are using Center’s gaia-matter. Interesting. I wonder who- oh, of course. This Heero is their conduit. I can see him. Feel him. He's a strong one. But strange... huh... fascinating... I wonder... //

Wufei ignored the speculative voice in his head. He almost shoved the co-pilot from his seat to get a better look at the viewer. The screen showed the huge mass of rocks and had focused in on certain parts where it had picked up movement. On a slight rise near the top of the hill, some figures had gathered, facing the ether-ripper. In the middle of the stone circle someone was kneeling. Wufei felt a prickle of battle fever heat his body; it was indeed Heero. The warrior was on his knees and looked - Wufei frowned - completely stoned. Which wasn't exactly what Wufei had been expecting, but he was certain that would change once he challenged his enemy.

There was a soft inner sign that seemed to emanate from right inside his left ear. //You don't listen very well, do you. He'll look that way even after you've stuck your fist through his body. He's being used as the conduit. He's gathering Center’s energy to cast the shield, and its occupying his entire mind and being. You need to kill him quickly - or at least drag him from that circle - before he does so. Hurry up, he won't be able to fight you, or even lift a finger for days after being used for-//

"He what?!"

// ...What?//

"I came flying here in this tin can to fight him! What do you mean he won't be able to?!"

//If they're using him as a conduit, then he'll either die or be completely drained for days-//

"Void dammit! I am not letting that happen! I came here to reclaim my race's birthright the honorable way! I will fight him to the death for it!"

// ...And just how-//

"I'll drag him out of that circle and wait for him to get better if I have to nurse him back to health myself! And then I'll kill him!"

// ...Right. Well, as long as you stop him.// Even to Wufei's incensed mind, Jusan sounded somewhat bewildered.

"Er, sir?" The pilots were now firmly convinced he was insane, Wufei gathered by the way they were staring at him, but he couldn't care less. "What-what do we do?"

"Stay here and keep out of my way!"

"Yes sir!" the pilot said fervently as Wufei spun and marched out of the cockpit.

 

"Here he comes," Fen murmured. No one else commented. Svale popped up besides Trowa, but was too out of breath to say much.

The figure in the white tunic walked down with swift steps from the ripper's hatch. He was quite some distance away, but every movement spoke of anger. Same as last time we saw him, Quatre reflected, he must have quite the temper. He watched in silence as energy gathered around the young man’s figure and lifted him gently in the air, to send him angling towards them. It was strangely graceful even as it was deadly.

"Er, kiddos, what's to stop him from flying straight over us and hitting Heero?" Svale croaked.

"He's too good a warrior to leave an unknown enemy like ourselves at his back," Quatre said absently.

"Ah, that's good to know."

"What Quatre means is that he'll kill all of us first before moving on to Heero," Trowa added, his own eyes on the lines of fate and intent converging on their little group.

"Oh... well, as long as that's clear," Svale said a bit weakly.

The dragon landed a dozen meters away, and crossed his arms over his chest. His eyes flickered over Quatre and Trowa, centered on Fen.

"So you are the ones Heero has chosen to defend him?" A voice like liquid honey purred, all strength and arrogance. "I hope you don't think you stand a -"

"By the hairy balls of Basht! Rabbit, are you blind?! What did you mean, he's 'good-looking'?! He's goddamn gorgeous!"

An embarrassed silence tripped over that remark and fell heavily between the two parties.

The Dragon had completely overlooked Svale's diminutive figure to start with. Boy was he looking at her now.

"Good looking?" Trowa asked Quatre out of the corner of his mouth, his eyes fixed on the simmering Dragon.

Quatre stopped rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Um... she asked-"

"Hey! Pretty boy! Wanna join us? Fen here decided he'd rather be on the side of cuteness than against it!"

"Svale!" Fen's strangled protest was ignored.

Quatre wondered if he could really see a glowing red light swirl around the Dragon or if that was just Zero's way of warning him to duck.

"Remove that... thing from the battle field or I will kill it," Chang said in a voice thick with fury.

"Oh honey, you can kill me any time you like! You can kill me all night long!"

He's our enemy, Quatre reminded himself sternly, fighting down his urge to apologize for her. The healer knew Svale was doing this just to gain a few more minutes - behind him, he could feel the power gather in the cirque. Much, much faster than they'd estimated. He somehow wasn't surprised Heero would outdo all their expectations. At this rate, they only had to hold the Dragon off for thirty minutes, maybe less.

He could see the Dragon tremble with anger even from that distance. But they were an honorable race, he remembered from what O and J had said, and Wufei visibly couldn't bring himself to shoot an old lady. The dark eyes turned on the rest of them in barely contained fury instead. Oops. Well, they'd gained a few minutes.

"What was Heero hoping?" the Dragon sneered. "That four pitiful warriors and...that thing...can keep me from killing him?"

Trowa and Fen braced themselves, while Svale paused in her heckling and frowned.

"He's cute, but he's rather stupid," she cackled. "Or at least he can't count. Why'd he say four warriors? I'll ignore the 'thing' comment. Men don't appreciate the charms of a mature woman until they've tried them. And then they can't look back!" She leered at the Dragon who appeared to have taken the path of least resistance where she was concerned and was trying to ignore her.

Quatre sighed. This... was maybe the hardest part. He put a hand on Trowa's shoulder - the shaman started under his touch - and, trying to keep his voice neutral, said: "He didn't miscount, Svale."

Trowa and Svale - and even Fen, who had been concentrating on the Dragon - turned to look at him in surprise. Quatre delved deep into the cold, calm analytical part of him that Zero had helped bring out, to curb any trace of emotion from his face and voice as he turned, that restraining hand still on his lover's shoulder, and said: "I see you decided to join us, Duo."

"You know I never miss an opportunity to party," Duo drawled from behind them.

 

Wufei was...well, furious barely began to describe it.

"What are you fools _doing?!_ "

None of his supposed enemy turned around to even acknowledge him.

//They don't seem to be very interested. What a thoroughly amusing group!//

He should just kill them all. Yes, one blast. If only they'd turn around! He'd been brought up in a rigorous culture of honor. Not only was it dishonorable to kill non-combatants - even that foul-mouthed harpy - but it was also not fair to shoot his enemy in the back. Which they'd all turned towards him when the slight, young man dressed in black had spoken. They seemed to be arguing amongst themselves now! Wufei ground his teeth.

//It could be a distraction. This young man... this Heero. The amount of power he's channeling over there is tremendous. He'll be able to cast the shield much quicker than I ever thought.//

Who cares?! Wufei raged internally.

//We've been through this. If he casts the shield, you will no longer be able to summon me. It'll block the link we've formed -//

I'll kill him, don't you worry. Or at least drag him out of there.

//Before he casts the spell.//

Yes yes yes!

What on earth was preoccupying those fools that much! How could they be stupid enough to ignore a fully armored high Dragon - rapidly approaching the point of spontaneous combustion - and turn their backs on him to stare at that- at that -

Wufei's snarl and thoughts strangled themselves as he caught sight of two violet-blue eyes.

He shook himself and quickly went back to being furious, ignoring that strange feeling of familiarity that had startled him for a second.

 

Duo was leaning against a rock as if he'd just strolled by for a chat. Quatre wondered if Duo had control of the situation or if he expected Quatre to be able to stop Fen or Trowa attacking that annoying smile.

For the second time, the healer reached up and lowered Trowa's crossbow as it pointed at Duo's heart. "Trowa, we can't have a fight on two fronts."

"You're right," Trowa said in a tight voice. He turned back to the Dragon behind them, raising his voice while keeping his tone polite. "Will you excuse us for a few minutes? We've got someone to kill here, but we'll be with you as soon as possible." He ignored the enraged inarticulate noises behind him and turned back towards Duo who'd raised an amused eyebrow.

Fen sighed. His eyes lost the gleam of fury that had lit them like sunshine on ice when he'd first turned around.

"Barton... " he said softly.

"No." Trowa’s voice was dead calm. "We cannot trust him. I refuse to fight with him."

"We don't have a choice, Trowa," Quatre said, his voice soft and sympathetic, his mind finding the best tone to get Trowa to calm down quickly and accept this; he hated using his abilities on his lover - deeply, intensely - but the urgency of the situation demanded a little manipulation. Duo, wisely enough, said nothing, just leaned there with a quiet smile on his face, arms loosely crossed over his chest and his long leather-clad legs stretched out before him.

"Love...what's done is done," Quatre whispered. "We'll deal with it later. Right now, he's here to help. And we need that. Desperately."

"Actually, I'm just here to watch you guys and cheer," Duo chirped.

"What?!" Quatre spun away from Trowa - who lifted the crossbow again - to stare at Shi No Kami.

"Yeah, I'm not really one for a big fight. You know, testosterone, fists swinging, face to face in a fair fight, rules of engagement and all that... right, Fen?"

Quatre and Fen were both motionless for a fraction of a second, then exchanged glances and relaxed. "Right," Fen muttered, the word tearing themselves reluctantly from between clenched teeth.

"Trowa," Quatre said, giving the arm beneath his hand a gentle shake. When the shaman glanced at him reluctantly, Quatre lifted his chin towards the cirque. "There's not much you can do against the Dragon, we have to rely on Fen. I need you over there, to protect Heero."

"I am not leaving you here with him!"

"I'm quite safe. Trust me."

"But-"

"Please!"

“Absolutely not.”

“You don’t have a choice.”

“What-” Trowa’s eyes leapt to the hand Quatre had extended, to stare at the Dragon’s ship a hundred yards off. Just as his brow started to crease in puzzlement-

As if that gesture had triggered it, there was distant whoosh, a warning beep-eep, beep-eep of a ramp unfolding. Half a dozen men started to descend before the ramp had hit the grass. Their lines unfolded, not towards the defenders but on a circuitous route around them, towards the cirque, and Heero. 

Trowa opened his mouth-

“I can’t come with you, the Dragon is the greater danger, Fen needs me here.”

"Very well," Trowa said, voice as flat and cold as ice over a raging torrent. He spun and headed towards the cirque. Stopped near Duo.

" ...I don't even need to make any threats, do I?"

"Won't touch a hair on his pretty head, Tro," Duo replied without looking up.

"I wish I could trust you, but I can't seem to forget what happened last time I did that. Must be the knife in my back with your name on it, acting as a reminder."

"Oh well, what is it you always say? The wheel turns?"

"We say that when people die, Maxwell."

"Go and defend Heero, or that wheel will be spinning for him."

Trowa ran towards the cirque without further hesitation, but Quatre could feel the shaman's heartbeat, an angry, anxious thread, ringing throughout his own body and making his soul ache.

 

 

What the hell are you doing, Jusan!

//What you weren't, Wufei.//

I will deal with this! Tell those men to get back in the ship!

//No. Don't worry, they won't kill your precious Heero. They'll just drag him out of the circle. He won't be able to stop them. Then the spell won't be cast, and you'll have all the time to pound these fools into the mud and move on.//

Do. Not. Interfere.

//Remember your place, Wufei. This may be your battle, but it's my war.//

"I'm the one fighting it. I should know," Wufei snarled. He turned towards the men who had finally decided to face him. One was armored, the others were unknown entities. The armored one faced him with no apparent concern - though no obvious anticipation either. The others showed no fear either, only grim resolve.

"We all are," Wufei said, nodding in salute to his enemy. Then he attacked.

 

Next Chapter: Impact 

Fight! Fight! Fight!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We finally see a bit of Heero's inner workings. Just a bit and voluntarily cryptic ^__^


	27. Impact

Someone with normal vision would have been surprised at the lack of, well, pyrotechnics in the center of the cirque, where the power for the huge, world-shaking spell was being gathered. There was just Heero, kneeling dazed and slightly slumped in a crude circle scratched into the dirt.

Trowa did not have normal vision. His one green eye alone could see the warping of the air around his friend that spoke of gathering power, and also noted the very unusual look on Heero's face that indicated something major was going down. The other eye, sacrificed to a different kind of vision long ago, took in the same scene, but instead of shapes, contours, colors and other illusions, it showed him the props and scaffolding behind reality. He could see the power, like a nuclear explosion in reverse, thundering into the circle and coalescing in Heero's mind at a frightening rate.

Blue eyes slowly focused on him, well, almost. Heero was staring at Trowa’s right ear in childlike wonder as if it was the most fascinating thing in the universe. Trowa found himself smiling fondly.

"Don't worry, Heero. I won't let them get near you," he whispered.

Heero, of course, didn't answer, but Trowa didn't need him to. The shaman glanced at a patch of golden hair like sunshine a hundred meters off of the cirque. One last look. They might not both survive the coming storm. The wheel turned. Trowa leaned his crossbow against his leg, loosened his headband and slipped it over his eyes. When he straightened, he was plunged into a world of patterns and lines, concentrating on the vectors of the approaching figures to the exclusion of all else.

 

The song of battle was rippling through Wufei's body. The pounding of his pulse, the hum and swish of Shenlong cutting through air, the tattoo of boots on earth as he weaved, dodged and attacked. Questions, doubts and Jusan had disappeared with the rest of the distractions as soon as the man - Fen, according to the old bag's previous words - had armored up and deployed a wicked flail from his glove.

Wufei balanced on one foot, dodged the whip whistling over his head, straightened one hand in an empty punch a meter away from his adversary - a small but deadly ball of energy shot from his armored hand, a ripple like a heatwave the only visible indication, whistling towards the man's head, intent on decapitating him.

Fen dodged easily, as if he'd seen it coming, as if he'd known Wufei would do that as soon as the Dragon had started to move his arm.

Wonderful, the warrior within purred. Heero was apparently a lost cause; even if Wufei could drag him from that circle, it wouldn't lead to much of a confrontation. But this man looked to be a proper opponent.

The whip flailed once more. His enemy had power, and an armor that seemed to be Dragon-inspired, but had an unusual configuration and unknown abilities. Fen spun, the whip giving him space while Wufei dodged back. A light flickered as Fen finished twisting and plunged towards the Dragon. The whip - a distraction. An energy sword sprang to life in his other hand.

Wufei almost laughed as he dodged first the whip, then slithered beneath the swing of the sword and straightened out in a punch. It didn't strike Fen in the face - good, the fight would have been over way too soon if it had. Fen managed to twist and catch the blow on his armored shoulder and staggered away.

"You'll have to do a bit better than that," Wufei said with a sharp smile. He took a step back, to let his adversary regroup and shake away the pain in his upper arm. Wufei spared a quick glance at the other two figures nearby. The blonde didn't look like a fighter. Magic user, perhaps? If he made any hostile move, Wufei would annihilate him quickly. He didn't like magic. The second man was wrapped in a moth-eaten black long-coat and leaning against a rock. He seemed to have no intentions of fighting, as he'd declared from the start. Smart of him, Wufei thought, flexing his fists and turning back towards Fen.

The armored man straightened. Wufei could feel him glare behind the mask that now covered his face. Fen attacked again, the next stanza of the song. There was a well-known voice in the back of Wufei's mind, trying to get his attention, ordering him to finish this quickly and move on. The Dragon ignored it.

This was his dance.

 

The visible world had disappeared. No more distractions. There were only the lines and patterns of fate and intent left, and Trowa observed them with detachment. Twelve men. Technos, with energy shields, light high-tech armor and laser rifles. Trowa could read their intent, spreading around them like a miasma of death and violence. He could read their fate too, as it intersected his own; he had already moved to place himself at the focal point, the place where he could have the most effect with the least effort. Most of these men were going to die, but they were strong and determined. There were too many possibilities for him to predict his moves too far ahead. The first four of these men were, for all intent and purposes, already dead. He was likely to neutralize most of the others as well. But after the dust settled, the survivors might kill him in turn. Trowa rifled the lines in his own, organic way, far removed from Zero's superior, complex and rigid calculations. Yes, the future was going to be interesting. But whatever happened, Trowa could and would protect Heero. He moved again, three steps to the left. More exposed, but insuring he was completely between the attackers and their objective. His fingers fanned through the quarrels in his quiver, dancing over the bands that identified them; he picked out two explosive bolts and slipped them into his belt. Whatever happened to him, those last men would not get near Heero. That much at least he could guarantee.

The men were ringing him in a half circle, sufficiently apart where they wouldn't hinder each other or be taken out with one strike from a high tech weapon. Professionals. But technologist ones. Trowa almost smiled, waiting. After a few seconds, one of them predictably swung up his laser rifle with a shrug, dismissing the strange figure that stood, blindfolded, between them and their objective, deciding to get rid of the obstacle the most efficient way possible.

"Oy," the biggest one of them said, slowly. "Wait, Jusan said-"

The man pressed the trigger and the laser rifle exploded. One down.

"-not to use our techno weapons on Center. Unless they're built special for this place, they can misfire," the slow one concluded. He was apparently the leader of the pack. If he was in any way concerned for his comrade, screaming at his burned and torn hands, Trowa couldn't see it even with his Vision.

There were curses as the men unslung their rifles and tossed them aside. They drew halotech knives and machetes from their belts, but Trowa could see the thought cross their minds - a line like an aurora borealis, faint but crackling with anxiety, hovering over the men's formation...Opposing a crossbow when armed with blades was not going to rate very high on the fun scale.

"Don't worry. It's a crossbow. Low tech weapon," the leader said, still slow and uncaring. "Jusan said our shields still work here. Those little pieces of wood won't get near us."

Trowa leveled his crossbow at the first man - lines warping around him, showing him the weak link in his enemies' formation, the linchpin that could scatter them - and let loose his 'little piece of wood'. The one he'd crafted himself, with a charm that would send it hammering through most shields, techno or otherwise.

 

Concentrate, Quatre cautioned himself, tearing his mind away from the battle into which he'd sent his lover to fight alone and heavily outnumbered.

Fen was making no headway against Chang. He was barely holding his own. To Quatre, the scene was overlaid and loaded with information like a heads-up display in a cockpit. The armors of the two fighters were not comparable; Epyon was a powerful piece, armed with Zero, but it was older and of different construction than Shenlong. It outmatched the lighter armor in pure power and weaponry, but it was heavy and unwieldy. The younger version of Fen was vigorous and strong, and a much better warrior than his previous persona. But... Quatre bit his lip. He wasn't fully into the fight.

And Chang Wufei was. Quatre felt fairly staggered by the focus and concentration radiating from that strong, slender figure. His first impression of the Dragon was that he was a tight little ball of undirected fury, and he assumed this would hamper him in a fight. But as soon as Chang had attacked, he'd become as focused and sharp as Fen's energy sword. And his movements-... Quatre, with Zero's cold detachment, marveled at the way the Dragon moved. Not a motion wasted; not a move that was not deliberate, a dodge setting up the form for the next attack, an attack already moving into a parry, as if he and Fen were dancing. Fen had Zero... but Wufei was still leading. Sheer skill, of an almost deadly elegance like the blade of a sharpened knife, was driving Fen back again and again.

"Fen isn't going to last long," Quatre muttered to the wildcard standing besides him quietly.

"Heero's doing good though," Duo answered thoughtfully. His eyes were on the fight in front of them, but his attention was apparently on the cirque at their rear, where the power gathered like an invisible storm cloud.

"Yes, but the Dragon will defeat Fen before Heero can gather enough power for the spell."

Duo leaned lazily back against the rock. Besides him, Svale was sitting on the same outcropping, looking at him out of the corner of her eye. For once she was as silent and ancient as the rocks around her.

"Fen could get killed," Quatre shot at Duo a bit more forcibly. Though he didn't know why he bothered.

A faint feeling flickered over Duo's mind, but it was gone too quickly for even Zero to catch and analyze. Maybe regret. Maybe resolve. Maybe a shrug of total indifference.

"Very well," Quatre muttered, concentrating once more on the fight. Zero was agreeing with Duo, laying out the coldly calculated parameters of their survival, how to stretch out their resistance to their enemy long enough to complete the objective, whatever the cost. Quatre flinched as he heard a small explosion behind him, from the cirque where Trowa was protecting Heero with his life.

No.

Concentrate.

 

If he didn't have to protect a stationary and completely oblivious target - Heero - Trowa would be doing a bit better...

The leader, for all he had the brains of an ox, seemed to know what he was doing when it came to leading an attack. He'd immediately understood the import of the first man going down, a bolt cleaving cleanly through the techno shield to thunk into his left eye. Under the big man's orders, the remaining attackers had taken shelter behind the stones of the cirque, almost surrounding Trowa and Heero. They were well organized, approaching in pairs, darting from cover to cover, dodging his shots. At first, they probably thought it was going to be easy - the bow must have looked slow to them, used to their techno weapons as they were. But the moves of their approach had been written clearly across their formation. Trowa had easily taken down his next two targets as they darted forward. His bolts had found them halfway to cover, knowing when they were going to move and where they were going to be when the deadly shots intersected their path.

The dying cries of one of his victims had turned into gurgles, ignored by both sides. The men were crouching behind the plentiful shelter in the cirque - too bad those Jishin created spells in stone, leaving plenty of small ridges, outcroppings and pillars to hide behind.

"It's just magic," the leader barked from behind a small stone wall. "Stay under cover and get closer."

There was some advantage to being stupid, Trowa reflected, readying his next shot. His men were terrified of Trowa's bow and ability to predict their movements, but the leader didn't seem to care. They were creeping towards him now, keeping the stones and broken pillars of the cirque between them and his deadly bow. They would gather in a loose ring, as close as possible, and then rush him.

Trowa quickly calculated, drew lines and patterns in his mind. He chose his spot, and planted seven bolts into the ground in preparation.

Behind him, Heero made a startled noise, which ended in something like a pleased, if bemused, hum. Center must have revealed another one of her secret wheels to him; their beauty, cruel and delicate as life itself, would touch and seduce even a hardened warrior like Heero. Well, Trowa reflected laconically, at least one of us is having a good time.

He loosed another shot, keeping one of the men, cursing, under the cover of a broken pillar. Slowing their approach was about as much as he could do now. He didn't spare a glance towards the other more serious fight nearby. His heart was over there... but to kill these remaining men, he didn't need it.

 

Wufei was winning. Of course. Even Jusan's nagging voice in his head had trickled to a halt, faced with the evidence of impending victory.

Fen dodged and swung. He was relying too heavily on his weapons. Wufei didn't have any - thanks to Jusan's rather hasty patching of Shenlong -

//Yes, sorry about that. There just wasn't the time.//

But he didn't need any. Wufei melted into the moment, into the action and the motion; the sword and the flail were moving in a rhythm like the steps of a dance. The Dragon dodged them in his own time, following his own beat, getting into Fen's defenses and leaving him helpless. A quick punch to the chest plate - the strange armor gave an ominous crack and Fen fell back, tried to regain the distance that would allow him to use the weapons that were, in fact, distracting him. A real warrior, faced with someone unarmed but much faster and lighter, would have discarded the bulky and lengthy sword and flail, and defended, parried and attacked by hand. Fen apparently didn't have the warrior instincts that went with the armor he wore.

Which was why he was going to lose. Wufei took a step back himself, letting Fen gather his defenses again.

//Can't you just... move in and kill him?// Jusan was almost fidgeting at the back of his mind. And probably aware that his voice was completely drowned out by the song of battle blazing through Wufei's body.

The whip flickered and danced. Wufei smiled, fierce and elated, and plunged into the movement once more.

//Oh, have your fun, I guess. Heero won't be much of a challenge. The others will get him out of that circle soon enough.// Jusan sounded resigned.

Wufei didn't notice.

 

Quatre watched the lines, but he also kept an eye on reality. Fen had held off the Dragon as well as he could - as much as his temporary allies could expect. But the differences in ability and attitude were beginning to show.

The healer would once have winced and ached in sympathy as Chang landed another blow on Fen's chest plate, already cracked previously. This time, the plate didn't ring, it simply crunched, and Fen staggered back, his body folded over the injury. The strategist that Quatre had become ignored Fen's pain, and only concentrated on the handicap a few broken ribs represented. The Dragon didn't step back this time. Black eyes watched the figure stumble. Judged the resistance to be at an end.

The lines tightened and narrowed as Quatre watched the young man take a step towards Fen, fist rising, intent on finishing off his enemy this time. A strange act of mercy, the healer noted distantly, at least in the Dragon's mind.

The patterns swirled and coalesced.

"Now," Quatre said.

Duo was already gone. On the rock, there was only Svale, looking grim and absently holding a tattered black long coat.

 

Wufei took the last step, fist raised, focusing on the target of his opponent's neck. A quick blow to the spine. It would take him out of the fight for good. Possibly kill him.

As his fist swung down -

\- movement behind him -

\- Wufei jerked away just as pain exploded in his back.

He spun, shocked - but his arms were up in the defensive stance he'd been practicing since he could walk, one over his stomach, ready to parry a blow to the chest or abdomen, another at shoulder level, ready to parry or punch -

The latter saved his life. The knife scythed through Shenlong's energy field as if it weren't there, scored the half-plate covering his forearm and skidded off his wrist to bite into his shoulder, instead of his throat where it had been aimed.

A reflexive pulse of energy from Shenlong hurled Wufei a dozen feet away from his attacker. He staggered as his feet touched ground, pain stitching up his entire left side. His arm curled around his body, feeling for the wound instinctively. Shenlong shone its damage report in his left eye. Nothing fatal - by half an inch. Muscles damaged. Mobility reduced. What the fuck-

"You."

It was the other one, the one dressed in black. Wufei's eyes narrowed appraisingly. The long overcoat had been discarded. The figure before him was lithe, dressed in a sleek outfit that hugged him from his neck to his booted feet, with high gloves cut off of the fingertips and palms - magic user. Wufei had seen that kind of outfit before. Not a grand mage who'd rely on pure power, but someone agile, good at hand to hand, who could also send a mage-bolt stabbing into your back if you were dumb enough to turn it towards him. He was holding a black blade, smaller than a shortsword, wider than a dagger, ending in a slanted edge rather than a point. It was so black that Wufei couldn't see his blood on it except where it gathered into thick, fat drops at the edge before falling off to splatter on the ground.

"I thought you said you weren't going to fight," Wufei heard himself saying, an automatic distraction while he tried to get as much information as he could from the other's stance and appearance.

"Yeah. I lied. I do that." The grin was cheerful with a feral edge, like a predator smiling at its lunch.

Little prick, Wufei started to think, annoyed... when he was suddenly bowled over by a fury quite beyond what he normally allowed himself in battle. The feeling of betrayal - _you lied, you lied to me?!_ \- made him choke.

//Wufei?!//

The anger was gone as quickly as it came, leaving a coppery aftertaste in his mouth and a wash of confusion in his mind. What had come over him there? The man had stabbed him in the back and he deserved to die, but Wufei, for all he fought honorably, was not stupid enough to expect his adversaries to do the same. He had no reason to be this furious. It was his fault for not keeping an eye on the creep in the first place. Which raised another question...

//How on earth did he get behind you so quickly? Be careful of that one, Dragon... //

Thanks, Jusan, whatever would I do without you.

//Sarcasm does not become you, Wufei, for all that you use it a lot. How badly are you wounded?//

"Not nearly badly enough to stop me tearing that little bastard limb from limb." Wufei walked forward menacingly. He was aware of movement off to one side - the last man, the short-haired blond, was helping Fen out of the way. No matter. Wufei ignored Jusan hectoring him to finish up the first opponent with a quick blast before moving on to the second. The Dragon knew he could beat Fen any time, and the man had at least fought him honorably. Let him live, if he could and chose to.

Wufei had someone else to kill first.

The backstabber’s smile widened. The ebony blade dipped and rose again in a mocking salute. "Shall we?"

Wufei didn't bother answering; this piece of trash did not deserve words, only a quick disposal. But Wufei wasn't careless. He was too good a warrior for that. Besides, he was aware of how difficult it should have been for someone to get on his six and try to stick a knife through his liver without him noticing. This was a piece of trash with some skill. He stopped three arms' lengths from the man. His opponent was waiting for him, knees slightly bent, body loose and relaxed. Wufei raised a hand, almost lazily, and sent an energy bolt plowing through the air at his target, just to see what the latter would do.

The pest smirked and dodged, bending gracefully backward and then snapping forward again, and darting aside to avoid Wufei's grab as the Dragon closed the distance between them. Wufei struck - punch, backhand - hitting only air. Fast. Very fast. The blade was a blur of black, but it didn't dart towards him again. Wufei didn't let it distract him. He was sinking into the rhythm of this new dance, its beat much quicker and more complex than the previous one. But the steps were nonetheless familiar. When the other gloved hand flashed behind the man's back, to reappear an instant later gripping something that looked like a mass of black energy, Wufei was quite ready for it. He sneered as he dodged the mana bolt. His left arm was already up and smashing aside the blade that had cut up and across, to slice him while he was supposedly distracted by the magical attack.

Once more, that eerie blade went through Shenlong's energy shield as if through thin air, but the actual Gundanium stopped it with a clang. It scored the metal but couldn’t pierce it, and Wufei's violent parry threw the young man's arm back. Wufei's other fist was punching towards his enemy's chest as he parried. The man writhed and twisted like a snake, but still Wufei's armored fist connected. The blow was off center though, glancing across the ribs instead of punching them into the creature's chest cavity. The pest leaped back gracefully, but a slight wince went through his frame, proof that Wufei's knuckles had scored some damage at least. The braid had whipped out like a banner as he jumped back; Wufei could see it slither back along his opponent's spine, like a serpent rather than a rope of hair. A strange feeling flared through him - like an echo of a memory now forgotten - but he automatically dismissed it. He didn't wait for his opponent to regroup his defenses as he had for Fen. This rat deserved no such courtesy. He pressed the attack again without pause or mercy.

 

Warmth spread from Quatre's hands to Fen's chest, healing torn muscle and cracked bone. The Phoenix didn't seem to notice though. He was staring at the fight a dozen meters away.

"I don't understand," Fen muttered.

"Why Duo doesn't use the magic he's capable of, you mean?" Quatre spared a glance at the fight - while Zero did its usual number on his brain, force-feeding him information on every strike and counter strike.

"Yes. I know he's capable of teleportation. And much, much more, if he's able to do that...Why doesn't he-"

"What, use high level magic against the Dragon?" Quatre's eyes kept darting towards the cirque behind them and he spoke absently. "Presumably because if he did that, Chang might be totally outclassed and helpless."

"And when was this not the point of this whole dust-up?" Fen asked acidly.

"If Duo corners Chang, then he might summon Jusan. Game over."

"Oh." Fen sighed and rubbed his face, wincing as the movement rekindled the dull ache in his mostly healed injuries. "You mean Maxwell is just slowing him down. Playing him."

Quatre glanced again at the battle. The Dragon had managed to catch Duo across the jaw with a backhand, though not directly enough to knock the braided man out. Duo was moving as fast as when he'd attacked Heero, and he was sweating. The smile looked forced to Quatre, who knew Duo fairly well by now. Though there was a feral glint in the violet-blue eyes...

"Yes, he's playing, though I don't think he's having quite as much fun as he’d like, if that's any consolation. I just hope he can hold out until Heero can cast the shield. Then no more summoning of planet-destroying entities possible. At that point... well, hopefully Duo can take the Dragon down."

"You know, it may not be that easy. Dragons have been fighting magic users for centuries now," Fen muttered. "They were part of the taskforce that defeated the remaining Jishin outposts when most had returned to Iwanohone. That's the kind of power the Dragons had fifty years ago, and it's only increased since. Even Jusan considered them a threat after all. Duo may be good, but his forte seem to be tricks, surprise attacks and speed, and-"

"Well, we'll just have to hope." Even Zero couldn't offer much more than that at this point.

"I'm... sorry, Winner."

"What?" Quatre blinked and looked down at Fen, who was slumped against the stone pillar they'd been near before. He looked... dazed. Lost. He was even managing to ignore Svale, who'd popped up and was groping his thigh therapeutically. Quatre shooed her off and kneeled next to Fen.

"Sorry?"

"I couldn't hold him off for long. He's... an exceptional fighter. And... every move I made, every defense I set up... I'd have sixty previous versions of me second-guessing them as soon as I started. It was... I couldn't- even Zero couldn't help with both my fractured mind and the fight-"

"Fen, considering you were blackmailed into this, I think you did more than enough." Quatre said firmly. "Now, we have to rely on Duo."

There was a moment's silence.

"And that's not a sentence you ever wanted to say, I bet," Svale cackled, her eyes bright as she watched the Dragon send a savage kick into Duo's legs. Quatre's answer disappeared into a horrified gasp as Duo stumbled, fell - and the Dragon pounced, fist raised to deal a blow that had the word 'terminal' written all over it.

 

Wufei smiled in satisfaction even as he threw himself at the fallen figure - then ducked as something flew at his face from the side. His hand was up to parry, but it didn't strike him. What-

What the fuck was that?!

Wufei stared at the tiny figure hovering in mid-air. It was as big as his fist, not counting the bat-like wings, outstretched as if it were soaring. It was a little humanoid figure, and it was - Wufei's eyes narrowed like laser sights - it appeared to be blowing a raspberry at him. When it was sure it had his attention, it started making faces, pulling a tongue like a sharp thorn at him and crossing minute, beady eyes. But it didn't seem to be able to do much more than annoy him. And distract him. The trash he'd almost felled had taken advantage of the lull in the attack, and dodged well out of harm's way again. No matter, Wufei thought, one blow and this creature would-

\- A blow sending a small lump of living stone catapulting into a rock face - the clean smell of cold water and rocks and - and -

What the-...

//Wufei? Have you seen this creature before?//

He had...but he was damned if he could remember where. No matter. He'd traveled extensively and seen strange things in his short years. Must have been on some planet or other, some weird, alien life form.

//It's a golem, actually. Stone brought to life by a spell. There aren't many left these days.//

There'll be one less in a minute, Wufei thought savagely. As if guessing his thoughts, the tiny creature dropped half a foot in the air and shot off at a right angle, straight towards -

"Master Duo! Are you alright?"

Figured. Something so crude, annoying and disrespectful just had to belong to that piece of garbage. Duo, hm? That's right, that was the name the others had mentioned before, when they'd been holding him at the point of their weapons and ignoring Wufei. Apparently this Duo had made no friends there either. Good, they would hopefully not interfere when he finished the annoying creature and its even more annoying master.

"Imp, I toldya to stay on the sidelines," the man, Duo, drawled at the tiny thing flying near his head.

"Sorry, Master," the piece of stone mumbled.

//So it belongs to him? How strange... Well, no matter. Wufei, that Heero is still gathering energy. I don't know what those fools I sent over there are doing, but they've not stopped him yet. Ignore this creature, go and kill the conduit, or destroy the sanctuary, or-//

If I ignore this Duo, he'll just stab me in the back again.

//... You must summon me. I could destroy them all, and the whole planet, with-//

Forget it.

//Wufei-//

No. This pest is fast, and fairly good, but he is no match for me. I will finish him in five minutes.

//But the spell-//

If worst comes to worst, I can destroy the sanctuary even after the spell is cast. That will bring down the shield, right?

//The resonance will die after awhile,// Jusan agreed in what Wufei could only describe as a sullen tone. //But I'd rather not have to wait and take the risk-//

That's what war is about. Risk. Now...

Wufei focused again, to the exclusion of all else, including the annoyed voice in his mind.

Now... to business.

 

\---

 

Next Chapter: The Sting

“Your boss is quite a card player. How does he do it?”

“He cheats.”


	28. The Sting

The flights of Trowa's bolts were shimmering threads of a spider's web, catching and snaring a few of his attackers, in the past, the present - _thunk-thwap_ \- and the future. Still too many of them. Too many. Six men left, and coming nearer. Now he had to turn violently to catch them as they darted between cover on all sides. It was making them bolder. The man he'd just taken down had paid the price of being too bold. The feathered bolt shivered as it stuck out from his ribs, in time with ragged, painful gasps of choked air into a pierced and collapsed lung. But still too many... Sweat rolled down Trowa's face as he plucked two more bolts from the ground, fitted them into the crossbow and fired in one smooth, sparse movement. The leader darted back - in Trowa's mind he was a solid block of murderous intent, like the rolling rocks on the cusp of an avalanche. He was surprisingly agile for a man his size. Trowa had known the bolt would miss as he fired it - the lines danced and warped in his blindfolded eyes - but it kept the big man pinned down. But the two others advanced...

A lull in that threatening forward movement, while they glanced at each other, trying to figure out who would move next, who had a better chance of making it to new cover without getting killed, and who they would rather want to see dead other than themselves. Trowa gasped, relaxed his fingers quickly. They were cramping from pulling back on the crossbow's mechanism. Behind him, Heero had been silent for awhile now. Trowa desperately hoped he was alright, but couldn't spare the slightest hint of vision to check.

He did glance off to one side. All this would be for naught if the Dragon broke through. Trowa ignored the ache in his heart that indicated that there was even more at stake, for him, than his own battle and his life. The Dragon was still at the same distance as before, thank Center. The line of defense against the stronger enemy was still standing, and the creature had not summoned Jusan. It was enough to make him believe in miracles- what the-...

The darting, dodging black form fighting the Dragon wasn't Fen. Blindfolded, Trowa couldn't see colors and materials, but he didn't need to. The Dragon was an iridescent shell of energy, his armor in turn shielding him and then darting out in murderous bursts of power. The figure dancing around, attack, parry, quick dodge and away, was not Fen's solid presence. It was a shimmering coil of potential and mostly-hidden intent, like a nest of black snakes coiling deep inside a pit.

Duo.

A very stressed Duo, Trowa thought distractedly, as he loosed another bolt in the direction of someone who'd popped their head up above a gray weathered boulder half way across the cirque. Duo had an exquisite control over the appearance of his lines, the ultimate camouflage, which was why the shaman had not realized Shi No Kami was hiding behind that cheerful grin and brilliant blue eyes until it was too late. Apparently that control had now abandoned him. Trowa could see its ragged remnants clinging like a black fog around the man's aura. It was obviously not by choice that his mask had slipped. Fighting the Dragon must be taking up all his resources.

Why was Duo fighting the Dragon? Trowa hadn't believed him for a second when the little backstabber had said he'd stay on the sidelines, but he couldn't see what Duo's game ultimately was. Well, no change there then.

Trowa longed to look at the unmasked Shinigami more closely. His instincts and his logic had been in a vicious deadlock over Duo since the latter had betrayed them. Logic said he could trust Duo considerably less than he could trust the sun to rise tonight. His instincts...normally Trowa trusted them, but they were the ones who'd stood idly by while Duo got Quatre embroiled with Zero. His instincts were in the dog-house as far as he was concerned. He wanted to examine Duo, the naked Shinigami, or as much as he was letting slip... and it wasn't all that much even now - the man was a master at hiding.

The leader roared, lunged forward. Trowa knew it was a distraction even as his bow twitched, then whipped back. The string slammed the bolt along a suddenly beckoning vector. Another of his attackers had thought to take advantage of his distraction. The man, who'd darted forward, squealed in fear, but the shot was off, only slicing into the skin of his shoulder before clattering, a suddenly harmless piece of wood, against a small stone wall behind him. The patterns had been clear: if Trowa hadn't fired right then, to miss, then he would have lost a second that would have allowed the leader and another attacker to move forward. He'd not killed the man, but he'd kept all of them pinned down still; that was what mattered. If they came nearer, he might be able to kill most of them, but it would only take one to slip through his guard and attack a defenseless Heero. The leader growled; he'd started to move forward too, but had to fall back again as the double-crossbow swung his way, second bolt a deadly promise.

The mystery that was Duo faded from Trowa's mind as he sank himself back into the patterns again.

 

Quatre was leaning back against the rock where Duo had been leaning, his mind so full of the warping of the future, his body was trembling with the stress. Each blow and counter-blow, each momentary flick of decision from either fighter, was radically hauling the future in one direction or the other, from salvation to Armageddon and back again in a matter of seconds.

Quatre had a lot on his mind...and a rock on his shoulder, a fact which was trying to distract him. He didn't let it. The small...thing sat on his shoulder quietly - apparently, when Duo, pressed back by the Dragon's renewed attack, had snapped 'Go sit with Quatre', the little creature had understood it to mean, go sit _on_ Quatre. Svale and Fen were standing on either side of the healer staring at the creature, but both Quatre and his unexpected passenger had their attention riveted on the fight.

He's not going to make it...Like a set of scales vacillating wildly, the future fluctuated in his mind, but the oscillations were sending the needle hovering more and more on the side of Armageddon. The Dragon was really good. And Heero still had several minutes left before he could release the Gaia energy into the sanctuary and trigger the shield spell. Duo was visibly getting to the limits of what he could do within the no-magic boundaries he'd imposed on himself, for whatever reason. They needed more time. Just a bit more time-

Quatre used every ounce of his will-power and abilities, throwing Zero out like a net, to snag any other element that could help them delay the inevitable. Zero was a tool, however complex; its user had to direct it, feed it other options, offer it other avenues to explore...A solution came to mind. He hated it instantly. It would increase the risk to Trowa and Heero, and the sanctuary itself had a higher chance of being destroyed. But Zero was pointing him to a nexus point in the near future, and it didn't look pretty...

Now how to put the plan in motion?

Quatre glanced sideways; a close-up of his little passenger, beady black eyes and skin like, well, like rock.

"Can you get near Duo? Without getting crushed by the Dragon?"

The beady black eyes blinked rapidly, with a tiny tink-tink-tink noise of stone on stone. "Yes?" the creature said, not very assuredly. It had a voice like two pebbles being rubbed together.

"Good. Make sure you don't distract him, but get near him and give him this message. Make sure you repeat it word for word."

"Will it help my master?"

"At this rate, it'll save his life."

The black eyes were riveted on his face as he gave the message.

 

This wasn't as fun as it had been with Fen. It wasn't because Wufei was a lot less nearer to winning than with the taller man. Winning was just the result of an mathematical formula; you measured your strength, tactics, luck and abilities against the opponent's, and the man still standing after the result computed and the blood had flown was the one fated for victory. But the enjoyment of a fight, the challenge, the deadly, beautiful dance...that went beyond winning and losing, beyond the cruel equation of life and death.

Not that his opponent wasn't good. The black form dodged, lithe and quick as a little black snake, and Wufei's fists bit air again. He'd stopped throwing energy bolts around; at this rate he'd exhaust himself before he had a chance of winging his fleet opponent. And besides, Wufei was feeling an intense desire to get his hands on that braided bastard, actually constrict that evanescent form to a final - and indeed terminal - standstill.

That was what was annoying; the pest just kept on dodging. Oh, Duo had gotten a few blows in. But they'd been mere caresses compared to the strength he would need to fell a Dragon. Duo had a wiry strength to his sparse frame, Wufei judged, but that wasn't enough to get more than a tickle past Shenlong.

Is that all you have? A stab in the back, and if that fails, you're done for?

Somehow, he didn't think so. He'd noted that Duo had not used magic after Wufei had casually brushed the second mana blast aside with a shrug of Shenlong's energy fields. But magic wasn't only a question of raw power, it could be subtle. And Wufei had a feeling that Duo's magic was an echo of his true self; dark, potentially powerful, full of nasty surprises and very much still hidden to date. But why... ?

//He's trying to delay you. This is all a distraction.//

That could be the case. It was true that the thought of getting his hands on that slender form and wiping that cruel, mocking gash of a grin away was very distracting indeed.

//I hope you know what you're doing, Dragon. //

Wufei merely smirked. Shenlong's glittering wings of energy shot out, blasting him forward. Wide blue eyes, caught in a moment of surprise - Wufei feinted, Duo dodged, the Dragon spun and finally connected, backhanded. Duo managed to save his skull from being caved by throwing up a forearm in parry and dart aside. Ahhh good move... so he was able of actually fighting, even if he lacked Wufei's physical strength and ability.

Duo was a few feet away again, rubbing his badly bruised forearm and glaring through the ever-present half-smile. There was a little fire in his eyes now, and for a second the grin went from mocking to savagely sincere, and Wufei almost smiled back. Then the mask came down again and the fighters circled once more, warily, like two tigers pacing.

A little blur of gray - that damned creature again. Wufei's mood had lifted a bit, despite the burn and ripple of pain from his wounded back and shoulder, so he didn't knock it out of the sky with a quick blast. Besides, he wanted to keep all his energy for its master.

Duo started as he caught sight of the creature. It flitted up to him and latched onto his shoulder. Wufei found himself pausing, though this could have been an opportune distraction. Duo blinked and leaned his head towards the little homunculi, though he kept a careful watch on Wufei. His eyes - a weird shade of blue that defied definition - widened and flickered briefly towards the two men sitting on the sidelines.

Wufei kept a cautious eye on Fen and the other man at his back. Fen looked a whole lot better than he'd any rights to be; the other man might be a healer. But neither seemed inclined to jump into the fight. And he didn't think the little stone creature had any combat potential at all. Duo was on his own.

The creature dropped from Duo's shoulder and flew back towards the other men, reluctance expressed in the heavy flap of its wings. Duo's eyes flickered away from Wufei, at the creature, making sure it could get away unmolested, then at the sanctuary around them. Once more the Dragon hesitated, but didn't launch an attack during that moment of distraction; honor could be burdensome thing.

Wufei was still contemplating the lack of foresight of his ancestors, who hadn't added a dispensation clause regarding annoying, long-haired pests in their dictates on honor, when he realized he was staring at empty space. He gasped and spun towards the Jishin ruins. There! The bastard had broken away from their fight! And he was running towards-

//He's going to attack the men I sent to get rid of Heero!// Jusan was suddenly an almost physical pressure in Wufei's mind.

"Then he's a fool!" Wufei snarled, sending a searing blast of energy at the back of that departing figure. A coward fleeing the fight deserved no consideration!

Duo dodged - did he have eyes in the back of his head?! - and dived forward to avoid a second blast. Wufei was already on his heels. Duo scrambled gracelessly to his feet. He appeared to have realized he'd made a tactical error. He was facing the advancing Dragon now, face pale and set, the grin finally removed. Wufei didn't let him gather himself, he attacked immediately. His foe dodged and weaved... but he was now in a field of stone blocks and ruins at the edges of the sanctuary's buildings. Wufei couldn't get a straight shot at him, but Duo's field of evasion was considerably hampered.

And he finally made a mistake. It was pretty much inevitable, and what Wufei had been waiting for.

Wufei was several feet away from Duo, but he heard the man's shocked gasp when, trying to put more space between them, he tripped over a low stone outcropping. The Dragon was on him in a second. Duo did his best - but found himself hemmed in by a formation of three huge stone pillars. He hesitated just that little second too long on which way to dodge-

Both of Wufei's fists crashed into the rock on either side of Duo's shoulders. Duo shouted in surprise at his foe's sudden appearance before him, his head jerked back to clonk amusingly against the rock. Wufei had put in an uncommon burst of speed to pin him there.

There was a moment of silence. Both men panted, staring at each other; Wufei could feel the savage grin of victory twist his lips. Duo's eyes flickered left and right... then widened as he apparently noticed the flickering in the air around him. Wufei's smirk widened; it wasn't easy to control Shenlong's energy wings in this way, bringing them to sweep forward and embrace both fighters and the rock against which Duo was pinned, but the small trapped animal look this rewarded him with made it worth the effort. He wasn't letting the little rodent get away with a trick and a twist this time!

A trickle of sweat ran down Duo's face. He licked his lips and smiled. It was tight and feral, and Wufei felt a slight grudging admiration. It looked like his opponent could face death like a man, despite his backstabbing ways.

"You're not going to put an end to it now, are you?" Duo asked lightly, interrupting Wufei's pleasant speculations about what horrible things he was going to do to the pestilence now that he had him.

Wufei snorted. "What do you think?"

"But we were having so much fun together!" Duo grinned toothily. There was even a slight suggestion of a leer.

"The amount of fun I was having dropped considerably when you stabbed me in the back, you little bastard," Wufei answered pleasantly. "I would have let you people live, with a few broken bones if you'd have been willing to fight honorably. But now...well, I'm going to have a lot more fun taking you apart than I had fighting you. As a warrior, we are not of the same caliber at all."

Duo made a tiny vexed 'huh' noise - sending a little puff of air tickling Wufei's face. A scent of clean water and rain on rocks tugged at a memory...

"Well, I'm sorry I wasn't fit entertainment," Duo said with a sniff. "But tell you what-"

Wufei saw the tension in the lithe frame. His left knee pistoned into his target before Duo could do more than twitch-

What the-... hell?!

Wufei stared at his armored knee, which had connected with... plain, bare rock, instead of nailing Duo to the pillar. There was nobody left between his fists at all. 

//What-... just happened?//

The Dragon snarled and spun around. There! The snake was ten feet away, just beyond the three stone pillars, panting. How had he moved that fast?! And how had he gotten through Shenlong's energy field?!

//Wufei, I think... I think he teleported. But that's... impossible. He's not powerful enough for that. It's all but a forgotten art these days anyway... How... //

Wufei ignored Jusan's speculations. Teleporter, hm? That made things difficult, but not impossible. He snarled and launched himself at the man -

And crashed straight into an invisible barrier.

Wufei staggered back with a gasp, clutching the shoulder that had impacted with-... something.

"Tell you what," Duo drawled from a safe distance, looking at him, amused. "Since I was such a letdown, lemme make sure you don't die of boredom by giving you a little entertainment. You have fun now! You can think fond thoughts about me in the meantime." The cocky bastard actually blew him a kiss, then turned and sauntered away.

Wufei carefully felt out in front of him, while Shenlong started flashing information into his left eye. He was in a cage of some sort; a barrier had sprung up between each of the three stones, rising and connecting above them as well. And - Shenlong rang an alarm - the barriers were slowly moving in. Very slowly but nonetheless, pressing against him, obviously intent on crushing him..

//Hmmm. It appears that by entering this triangle of stone, or by striking that rock, you triggered an ancient Jishin trap.//

Yes, thought Wufei, this was familiar. The Dragons and the Jishin had fought over many centuries; the new, ambitious race at the start of their expansion, facing off with the remnants of a decadent, dying people on their way out. It was possible that this trap had been set specifically to catch Dragons, though he thought the sanctuary looked a bit old for that. It could just as easily be a trap set for anything mechanical - like Shenlong - that happened to launch an attack in proximity to the sanctuary. The Jishin had always been weary of techno enemies; the magical ones had never dared attack them.

//Can I hope this is where you summon me?// Jusan actually sounded resigned to the answer he was expecting.

Hell no. Wufei had never fought a Jishin, their race had dwindled and forsaken the battlegrounds before he was even born. But the Tricksters had been the greatest enemy of his race at one point, the only ones who could pose a real threat to Dragons, and so he and all his peers had been taught to fight anything magical and/or Jishin as savagely as they fought any enemy. Wufei flexed Shenlong's energy field, while he ran through the mental and spiritual mantras that prepared him to fight on a different level than physical. The barrier's progress slowed, faltered...Wufei hated magic, but he was far from helpless against it.

//Yes, I guess I should know now not to underestimate you, or your stubborn pride.// Jusan didn't sound particularly put out. //You'll be glad to know that I've calculated the rate this Heero is cumulating energy. Knowing your capacities, if you break this barrier as fast as I estimate you can, you will have a few minutes to finish this before he can cast the shielding spell. That's assuming those incompetents I sent haven't taken care of him already. If they haven't, you have my permission to terminate their miserable existence-//

Jusan?

//Yes?//

I'm trying to concentrate. Please, with all due respect, shut the fuck up.

//Yes, Wufei.// Jusan's voice was it's usual mixture of cold humor and condescension, as if a child had made a face at him. Wufei made a mental note to himself to be very annoyed about that later on, but for now he had to concentrate, break out of this trap and then kill everyone.

The mystical barrier creaked, and slowly, very slowly, started moving in the opposite direction, away from the irate Dragon.

 

There were only five uninjured men left when they finally rushed Trowa.

Two men died before reaching him, then-

Trowa threw his crossbow at a third, drew his hunting knife at the same time. He dodged. A halotech machete whistled where his neck had been. The man who'd come up behind him kicked him hard in the back. It hurt, but he hadn't dodged - the move served him. He fell forward and rolled with the momentum. Up and thrust, knife in the first attacker's gut - one more down.

The choice was crystal clear, as if everything was frozen and painted on cold glass. There were two men left. The leader was following Jusan's orders, completely ignoring the shaman and the fate of his last underling, and heading towards Heero. He had a foot on the dirt circle. The other man had taken the two steps separating him from Trowa and had a sword poised above the shaman's head, about to skewer his target to the ground.

His life or Heero's.

Trowa didn't hesitate. The knife flew out of his hand and sunk itself deep into the back of the leader's head, the soft juncture between spine and skull. The man crumpled two feet away from an oblivious Heero, dead in an instant.

The sword sliced down-

Trowa could have dodged, but he didn't. His instincts were telling him that he could not move fast enough to avoid the man's weapon.

And the lines of fate were telling him he didn't need to anyway. The man was already dead.

His enemy staggered, and blood erupted from his mouth and chest as the mage blast went clear through him. Trowa realized - a second too late - that if dodging had not been a life-and-death matter, it would have saved him from a very unpleasant and bloody tackle on the part of the corpse.

Breathless, he heaved the body away from him, ripped off his blindfold, sat up and found himself bowled over again almost immediately.

"Stay down! Where are you injured?" Quatre gasped, hands feeling Trowa's chest, his back, ignoring the blood quickly griming them. That explained where the mage blast had come from, Trowa realized, suddenly very tired.

"Nowhere, nowh-" Trowa gasped as Quatre's hands reminded him of the last man kicking him down to the ground. Oh, right; in the rush, he'd forgotten all about that.

"Nothing broken. Just badly bruised," Quatre murmured, prodding gently. Then he darted in, quick and light as a sparrow, and brushed a small feather-like kiss on Trowa's cheek just as his fingers felt the extent of the damage; the best distraction, in Trowa's opinion, better than anesthetic.

For a precious moment, it was just Quatre again, his kind and gentle healer...Trowa tried to ignore any distraction, wanting to enjoy this short respite, but with the distraction right in front of his nose and staring at him, that was rather difficult.

"Quatre," he whispered, "what do you have on your shoulder?"

A quick kiss trembled on his lips as an itching pain burned in the bruised muscles under Quatre's healing hands. "Don't worry about it."

"But-"

"Shhh-"

"But you have a- a- there's something made of stone with wings on your shoulder," Trowa said a bit plaintively. The beady-eyed thing was examining the shaman with open curiosity, before turning its eyes back towards where Quatre had been earlier. Trowa followed its gaze, dismissing the minor mystery in favor of a more important problem.

Outside the cirque, at the edge of the sanctuary's inner circle, Duo and the Dragon were facing off. Trowa's eyes narrowed. No, there was something strange...as he watched, Duo made a gesture Trowa couldn't discern, and then carelessly turned his back on the Dragon, who appeared to be blocked by something.

"What-"

"Those three pillars are an old defense mechanism," Quatre explained absently. He was frowning in concentration as he passed healing hands over Trowa's back. The pain had lessened already, and the shaman could feel his muscles move more freely as he straightened and sat up properly. "I studied several of the sanctuary's weapons after I obtained Zero. This was one of those still working, though its field is very limited now. It's a minor barrier. Zero doesn't think it will stop the Dragon for very long, but...any time gained at this point... "

Duo had entered the cirque and walked up to them. Fen, who'd been checking the fallen foe who hadn't run away, making sure none of them were any danger, glanced up and then, eyes narrowed, went to stand next to Quatre. Trowa scrambled to his knees and looked around for his crossbow. He still wasn't sure where Duo stood in the scheme of things, even if he was fighting the Dragon for reasons that were doubtlessly his own.

Duo leaned forward, hands on knees, and breathed deeply. "He's rather perkier than I thought he'd be," he commented mildly, straightening up again.

"Why were you toying with him?" Fen barked. Trowa studied Duo's face in some surprise. The braided man had not looked like he was toying with anybody during that fight.

"What do you mean?" Duo didn't look particularly surprised by the accusation though.

"I know your abilities. You could have caught him off guard by teleporting. I think you could have used a good deal more magic than you did. And to start with-" Fen's eyes narrowed, dangerously. "To start with, I know from first hand experience that when you stab someone in the back, you're not prone to miss."

Duo latched his fingers around the back of his neck and stuck his elbows in the air as if he hadn't a care in the world. "He's a good deal faster than you are, Fen," he drawled, insultingly.

"So are you," Fen bit back.

"Ah well, that's true. I wasn't really trying that hard to kill him." Duo shrugged, elbows jabbing upwards. The devil-may-care grin was back in full force. If he was worried about being sweaty and bruised and rather outclassed by the Dragon, he didn't look it.

"So? What were you playing at?" Fen snapped.

"I was slowing him down, obviously. And I didn't use magic because I was worried he might summon Jusan." Duo glanced back at the Dragon, who was glowering at the barrier - which sparkled with fine lines of force in Trowa's eyes. They seemed to be bowing outwards. "The teleporting was a bit of a gamble, he took me by surprise when he blocked me like that. But he's apparently decided to ignore that and fight on by himself anyway. He's as stubborn as the tide, that one. As for why I didn't actively try to kill him... There's something you don't know about the herald link, Fen. Actually, there are two things you don't know."

"Oh?" It was Quatre who prompted the grinning Duo for an answer. The healer patted Trowa on the back, a final gesture indicating he'd finished. The bruises were much better, Trowa noted thankfully, he'd regained his full mobility. They both turned their full attention on Duo.

"The first thing you don't know," Duo drawled, addressing the healer and not a simmering Fen, "is that, to protect his herald from being rubbed out before he can even be summoned, Jusan creates the link with a trigger. In case of death, it will immediately send a huge wave of destruction blasting out all around it. I'm talking a hole in the ground the size of several cities."

"Oh." Quatre didn't sound all that surprised, it seemed to confirm something he'd surmised.

"Yeah. Oh. I couldn't afford to have the Sanctuary destroyed-"

"Glad to know you care so much about our health," Trowa muttered, not at all surprised by that either. "What's the second thing? That we don't know about the herald?"

Duo grinned. "That's for me to know and for you to never find out... if we're lucky."

Trowa didn't respond to that. Merely closed his eyes and watched the force-field imprisoning the Dragon warp further and further out. He tightened his grip on his crossbow as the field collapsed. Chang walked out of the pillar of stone and looked around. Spotted them and turned, intent clear even to those without Vision.

"There's nothing you can do, Trowa," Quatre said quickly, putting a hand on his lover's arm.

"I can slow him down a bit."

"The time it takes him to kill you, you mean," Fen pronounced clearly, his eyes on the approaching figure. The Dragon wasn't flying. He was walking. Slowly, deliberately, his body tense with fury.

"If that's what's needed," Trowa stated calmly.

"It won't be... "

The murmur caught all of them off-guard. They glanced back.

Trowa fingered his crossbow nervously, still not sure about Duo and unhappy that the mysterious man had approached Heero. But the look on Duo's face... it was indescribable. He looked older, infinitely weary, but also...relieved, with a bone-felt anticipation of one who had waited his whole life for this precise moment. His eyes were fixed on Heero, the shade even stranger and more indefinable under the influx of strong emotions which he'd always hid previously. 

"No one's going to die today," Duo added softly. For once there was nothing hiding Duo's lines, and his intentions were clear to the shaman; he'd have sacrificed every one of them to get to this point. But he was infinitely glad that he hadn't needed to.

"Just how were you going to stop Chang?" Quatre asked. The approaching Dragon was nearly at the edge of the cirque. The fact Quatre had asked the question spoke volumes to Trowa. It confirmed what his vision of Center's lines were telling him; they were at a nexus point, a tangled knot in the near future, and even Zero was now blind to what was going to happen. He just hoped Duo had some control over it; Trowa rather wished Duo would get out of Heero's circle and prove it, preferably by stopping the Dragon, although how he could do that when he was obviously not up to Chang's level as a fighter...

Duo smiled. It was small, but honest. He crouched before Heero, looking into the wide blue eyes which were struggling to focus on him.

"You did it, Heero," he whispered. A black-gloved hand reached towards the tangle of bangs half-covering Heero's eyes - Trowa lifted his crossbow, his instincts telling him there was no danger to his friend while his common sense was telling him to plug Duo on principle. Duo smirked as Heero's eyes tried to focus on his hand and failed. "Wow, he's completely out of it, eh?"

"Don't distract him," Fen muttered, glancing back from the Dragon.

"Distract him? A bloody earthquake couldn't distract him." Duo chuckled as if he'd said something very witty, then the smile became almost tender and he leaned forward and kissed Heero's forehead. "Thank you, Heero," he whispered, so low Trowa could barely catch the words. "Don't you worry about a thing. Just make sure you don't lose any of the energy when you release it into the Sanctuary. Svale will direct the spell and do the rest."

"Maxwell?" Fen's voice was tight with worry. The Dragon was half way through the cirque and had lifted a hand; energy twisted like dust devils above his palm. Shenlong had writhed along his arm and formed some sort of cestus over his hand, ready to direct that energy where it would hurt the most.

"Coming!" Duo chirped, leaping away from Heero - who was still trying to focus where Duo's hand had been - and bounced out of the circle as if he hadn't a care in the world.

Trowa's crossbow, with a special Dragon-armor-piercing bolt ready, was centered on Chang, but he found his eyes drawn to that figure, radiating confidence as it took a stand between them and the Dragon. Duo looked perfectly relaxed. The Dragon, for his part, looked ready to fry them all on principle.

"Back for more, hm?" Duo chuckled.

The Dragon had stopped twenty feet away, his arm raised towards them menacingly. From that distance, Trowa could still see his jaw twitch in fury at Duo's irreverent tone. More energy gathered over the metal that had curled into a jaw-shaped clamp. Trowa remembered the shattering pulse of energy that weapon could deliver, and that had been months ago when the Dragon had been exhausted and his armor half-broken.

"Oh, not gonna talk anymore?" Duo sighed elaborately, but Trowa thought he caught...a glimpse of something in Duo's lines just then, something that wasn't mocking.

Chang sneered and Shenlong’s weapon clicked, the sound loud in the horrified silence of the circle. Then a rip of localized thunder as the Dragon fired.

Duo casually lifted a hand and made a swatting gesture.

The energy dissipated mid-air.

Trowa had side-stepped to place himself between Heero and Quatre and the upcoming wave of lethal power, however useless that would be. Duo's move and sudden surge of magical power took him by surprise, but the Dragon didn't seem all that shocked. He leaped at Duo with a cruel sneer, ready to finish by hand what his energy blast had been unable to do.

Echoes of the shot were still ringing in the cirque and a strong wind - the result of the blast's kinetic energy being dissipated into the air - was sweeping the cirque, but Trowa could have sworn he heard Duo mutter something just as the Dragon was about to hammer into him.

It sounded like “I'm sorry”.

Everything stopped.

Chang was four feet away from Duo, fist cocked, ready to slam into the black-clad figure who had made no movement to dodge. The Dragon seemed frozen into the moment - then he blinked and a tremor went through him. Trowa watched, heart in his mouth, as he jerked once as if against some invisible restraint. Deep-black eyes widened, first in confusion, then in fury, then in ever-growing horror.

On his forehead, something was flickering like an ember. A shape that looked like it was carved into his skin.

"A mark of control," Quatre breathed out suddenly, as if he finally understood everything. Maybe he did, but the shaman was almost as confused as the Dragon. The mark of control was there, shining on Chang's forehead, but to cast it, Duo must have been in close proximity for quite some time, must have even-

"-been allowed into the Dragon's mind," Quatre concluded, his voice bitter, and Trowa realized he'd been uncharacteristically muttering his confusion aloud. "Yes, I know how it works."

"He didn't have the time to cast it during that fight... did he?" Trowa wasn't sure of Duo's powers, but the Dragon looked extremely strong-willed and wouldn't break easily. It couldn't have been done during the fight.

"I suspect that Chang's had that mark of control for quite awhile now," Quatre said slowly. "The only question is why. Why did Duo allow all this rigmarole to happen in the first place?"

The Dragon snarled, a deep, primal noise, and his fist, which was still raised, twitched, then jerked. The mark on his forehead sparked and shone brighter.

Duo's eyebrows arched. He'd stuck his hands behind his neck again, an arrogant pose speaking of complete insouciance. "My, you really are frisky... my pretty Dragon."

Trowa thought he saw something dart into Chang's eyes at that - behind the wave of perfectly justifiable fury at being called pretty, or indeed, Duo's Dragon.

"Don't try to fight it. It'll only hurt," Duo added, his voice softer now, almost sympathetic.

If the Dragon noticed - or cared - or indeed was in any pain at all, it wasn't apparent. That arrogant mouth tightened further and the fist jerked forward again, this time it was almost an abortive blow, before being brought up short, a foot in front of Duo's face.

The latter sighed dramatically. "I just knew you were going to make this hard on yourself. You just can't take the easy way out, can you. Very well. Stop!"

Wufei shuddered, and his hand dropped suddenly to his side. Black eyes widened in horror as he visibly realized just how little control he had over his body. The mark shone so brightly Trowa could make it out, an elegant assembly of strokes forming a symbol.

"Relax," Duo ordered, still in that same, hard, commanding voice.

This order had apparently no effect at all. Chang was still twanging with fury and about as relaxed as a rock.

"Oh, Nai-no Kami-..." Duo rolled his eyes, visibly irritated at the Dragon's stubborn resistance. And then... Trowa felt a brush of ice along his spine. Duo smiled. It was cold, cruel and very ancient, and imprinted with an almost casual malice.

"Kneel.”

The Dragon hissed and tottered. But a core of steel was suddenly revealed in those black eyes, fastened on Duo. Chang's body twisted, his knees trembled, and he staggered back another step, but he still glared. Two trickles of blood, from where he'd savagely bitten his lip and from a burst vein in his nose, spoke of the price he was paying for his defiance. His knees trembled again and he almost sunk to them, but with a twist of his body - Trowa winced, almost tasting his pain at the effort - he turned the movement into a half-crouch, from which he looked ready to spring at his tormentor if given the slightest sliver of a chance, even if it cost him his life.

Next to the shaman, Quatre finally breathed again, a shivering sigh. Trowa glanced at his lover. Quatre’s face was white and lined with pity and sympathetic pain.

Duo wasn't looking too happy either. The cold smile had slipped, replaced by a slight frown. He crossed his arms loosely over his chest and shook his head.

"I swear, Wufei, I've personally known mountains less stubborn than you are. I should warn you...there are a lot of voices in my head and many of them don't like Dragons much. You might want to be a good boy, or they could start talking to me again."

The look of feral hate that earned him was answer enough.

"It's okay, Dragon. You can stay standing if you like." Duo sighed dramatically and shrugged. Chang slowly straightened, eyes still furious. "The principal player is about to show up, and I'd rather torment him than you any day."

Principal player...? 

Trowa felt it. A slight shift in the air, a tremor in the lines, and...something extremely powerful, materializing a few feet behind Chang. The shape was faint and flickering at first, then-

Then there was a man standing there. Tall, urbane, dressed in something resembling a uniform, with high black boots and a sword at his side. He was staring at Duo, his face unreadable.

"Maadaku dai Juusan!" Duo smirked, a knife-like grin. "How nice of you to join us!"

 

\---

Next Chapter: Justice

Please allow me to introduce myself...


	29. Justice

"Maadaku dai Juusan! How nice of you to join us!"

There was a very interesting silence in the circle of stones for a few seconds. The kind of silence found at the heart of glaciers.

Trowa, eyes fixed on Jusan's tall form, lifted his crossbow and wondered if he should even bother. Then he felt a hand on his wrist.

"Don't bother."

"Yeah, that's what I was thinking."

"No." Quatre was staring at the tall man twenty feet away. "I meant, look at him. At the lines."

Trowa was tired. Bone tired. He'd been fighting hard, using his Sight to its full extent, but it had all been for nothing and they were all going to die. What was there to look at-

Wait a second...

"That... can't be Jusan," he muttered. The lines of power and intent were absent. Maybe the Scourge was just too big to comprehend?

"It's not him," Duo threw over his shoulder, his eyes still fixed on the creature. "It's just an illusion. He's projecting an image of himself through his link with 'Fei."

"I didn't know he could do that," Fen commented softly, eyes narrowed at the figure who was ignoring everyone but Duo. "Was that the second thing you told us about? That we didn't know about the herald link?"

Duo blinked and then looked sheepish. "Um, okay, there's three things you don't know about the herald link."

"Idiot," Fen muttered.

"Wufei, look at me." Jusan's voice was soft yet commanding and cut any reply Duo might have made.

"Wufei, I know you can hear me now. Look at me," Jusan repeated.

The Dragon was still visibly suffering from his resistance to the mark of control, which was smoldering like an ember on his forehead. He'd leaned forward again to rest his hands on his knees and steady himself. His face was set in harsh lines of pain and drying blood streaked across the copper of his skin. He blinked on hearing his name and looked up slowly.

"Jusan? What-... what-... I didn't summon you-"

"Wufei, listen carefully. This creature is stopping you from hearing my voice through our link with his damned Mark, but now that I've materialized my image, he cannot stop us from communicating. Summon me, Wufei. Use the medallion I gave you to boost the herald link. I will break his control over you and then kill him very, very slowly."

Wufei started to move. The mark of control flared and then burned steadily. Chang's face twisted with pain, but also with the furious stubbornness that Trowa was starting to associate him with. Slowly his hand lifted towards his chest. Trowa realized he had a small flat disk on a chain hanging from his neck, over the white silk tunic and Shenlong's metal. As the shaman looked at it more closely, he saw the nasty little warping of energy patterns around the medallion, some of them sinking lines like hooks into Chang's crown chakra.

Trowa lifted his crossbow, then remembered that if he shot the Dragon, it would trigger an explosion that would destroy the Sanctuary, as well as all of them. Besides... Shenlong's energy fields were crackling fiercely. Even with the mark of control on him, the Dragon was still very, very dangerous and wouldn't be easy to kill or restrain.

"Duo, do something!" Quatre hissed. "Can we remove that necklace?"

"That would be inadvisable," Jusan said softly, proving this was, in fact, two-way communication despite the staggering distance of many parsecs. "That medallion is connected to my power and a manifestation of my will. If you want to die now rather than later, you can touch it if you want."

"I'll pass," Quatre answered coolly. "Duo, I don't know what clever plan you have, but now would be a good time to-"

"He can't do anything," Jusan affirmed as if it were a universal certitude. Trowa's hands clenched on the crossbow, feeling pretty useless. "None of you can do anything. It was clever to try a mark of control... little worm." He was talking to Duo who was staring back at him, face set. "But your tricks cannot defeat Wufei's willpower. It is why I chose him as my herald-"

Duo burst out laughing. "Oh, Juusan, for an immortal Power, you sure are easy to hoodwink!"

Jusan's face showed not the slightest hint of any doubt. "What do you mean, Trickster?"

"I mean, oh powerful Lord Juusan, that maybe you should be wondering since when do I have a mark of control on _my_ Dragon." Duo walked towards Wufei. The latter had his fingers three inches from the medallion, his face contorted with effort and enough anger to ignite the oxygen around him.

"What does it matter to me?" Jusan's voice was undisturbed as Duo drew up before Wufei.

"You lack foresight." Duo lifted a gloved finger to his forehead, resting it against the black leather thong that wrapped around it and danced down among the strands of his braid.

Wufei's glare could have cut holes in steel plate, though he said nothing, all his concentration on moving against Duo's will. The mark of control was an angry fire-red, fresh blood was dripping down his face, but his fingers inched closer to the medal around his neck regardless.

Duo removed the finger he'd had against his forehead and touched it to Wufei's. "Here, Dragon. This belongs to you."

"I don't know what tricks you-" Jusan was interrupted by Wufei falling to the ground bonelessly.

"Wufei?" Jusan still showed no signs of...anything. This was a mental projection, Trowa reminded himself. It would probably only show what its owner wanted it to. If its owner felt anything at all.

The Dragon was gasping - finally on his knees, Trowa thought absently, boy is he going to be pissed off about that. The young man sounded like he'd been fatally stabbed. His head was bowed, his hands digging into the meager turf of the circle as if he was drowning in air. Duo had stepped to the Dragon's side, and was looking down at him intently.

"Wufei." Jusan still sounded so calm. "I do not know what he's done to you, he's still blocking your thoughts from me. But I can free you. Summon me, Dragon. Now."

"J-... " Wufei's lips moved soundlessly. His entire body convulsed, one massive shudder. "Ju-... "

"Yes. Summon me, Wufei."

"Ju-san... .g-... go... to... hell..."

That interesting little silence was back. This time it had been visiting the molten hearts of stars.

Wufei slowly lifted his face. His breathing had evened out. And there was a new look in his eyes. His emotions were fractured and muddled in Trowa's vision. Despair, buried in fury. Pain, overlain with resolve. Loneliness, shouldered aside by stubborn self-reliance. Hurt, strangled by contempt. That last solidly directed at Duo, no surprise there.

Trowa heard a small groan next to him. He glanced at Quatre, who'd gone as white as a sheet, staring at Wufei. He didn't know if it was Zero or his lover's empathic abilities that were causing him to shiver. Maybe both.

"Wufei." Jusan's lack of emotions was getting annoying, Trowa decided, as he put his arm around the healer, wanting to somehow share the burden and knowing he couldn't. Jusan made an adequate target for his frustration.

"Go... to... hell... " Wufei whispered again, his voice cracking.

"What are you doing to him, worm?" Jusan glanced up at Duo. He didn't even look curious.

"Well, nothing, now!" In contrast, Duo was showing his usual range of smugness and cheerful good humor. "You got to ask, what did I do the first time I met Dragon-boy here. Back when he attacked Heero. And I rescued him and healed him and generously saved his life. You remember that now, right, Wufei? All those memories back where they should be?"

"Fuck you!"

"You're welcome. You seem to be feeling a bit better. I know that was a lot of screwing around I did in there, I'm sorry."

"Like hell," Wufei muttered. He was still staring down at the sod, grasping it as if he were feeling dizzy.

"Yeah, you're right, not sorry. You see, oh Thirteenth Aspect - oh don't be shocked, we know who you are, we did do a lot of research on you," Duo added quickly, though Jusan had shown absolutely zero emotions or surprise at the appellation. Trowa wondered if Duo knew the Scourge so well that he could guess what Jusan was feeling, or if the braided man maybe didn't have quite all his dominoes in a row.

"You see, when Wufei came here to get Wing back, he wasn't doing it for the pride of his race," Duo continued, scoffing. "That's something I made up, based on stuff I saw in his head when I was healing him. It sounded daffy to me, but he seemed to think it was really important, so I built on it."

There was something like an animalistic growl from the kneeling Dragon. Trowa hoped Duo had kept his mark of control active, because Chang looked ready to kill everybody on the planet out of sheer fury.

"But in reality, Wufei was looking for Wing for quite a different purpose. To get really, really strong and mean. Well, meaner. It turns out, 'Fei and I have something in common. And I never thought I'd ever have anything in common with a Dragon, but that's beside the point. You see, he wants to kill you!"

"Justice... " It sounded like the word had been dragged from the deepest part of the Dragon's soul.

"Yeah, he calls it justice, but mainly he wants to kill you," Duo said, with a dismissive wave of his hand that nearly knocked Imp, flying up to him, out of the air.

"Justice." Wufei had straightened from his slumped position and put his hands on his thighs. Sweat, blood and pain-filled tears were marring a strikingly handsome face, but the look in his eyes as he turned towards Jusan - a core of pride and almost holy anger - gave Trowa a sudden touch of respect for the man.

"Is this about your people, Wufei?" Jusan's voice had changed slightly when addressing his herald. It sounded... warmer? More real?

Wufei slowly lifted a hand, his eyes still fixed on the image of his master. Trowa, Fen and even Quatre stiffened as the fingers drifted near the medallion. But the hand passed over it, and wiped the bloody smear from the Dragon's mouth.

"Yes. It's about them." The voice was hoarse, but sounded calmer now.

"I thought we'd been through all this. The rules of your own people say that you should follow your conqueror."

"Ah well, that was some more shit I made up for your benefit, Juusan, and carefully placed in his mind." Duo laughed gleefully, lacing his fingers at the back of his neck in a familiar gesture now. "I can't believe you bought all that claptrap!"

Trowa was looking at Wufei - looking at the emotionless Scourge was pointless, and looking at Duo made his fists itch a bit, as all this was reminding him a bit too much of what Quatre had gone through. He saw the Dragon stiffen violently and twitch, but the black eyes stayed fixed on Jusan despite the provocation.

"I would have followed you if you had conquered my people honorably." Wufei's voice was quiet but intense. His hands had fallen back on his thighs. He looked as inflexible as a rock. "I will not follow a murderer who slaughtered them like a coward."

"I fail to see the difference," Jusan replied calmly.

"You would!" Wufei spat, then regained that preternatural calm that spoke of more anger than he could ever show. "You attacked our home planets first. You did not meet us in battle. You massacred our loved ones - you attacked our wives and husbands and children! You killed non-combatants. The Dragons came rushing back to help - from the four corners of the galaxy where _you_ had sent us! We were disorganized, thinking only of saving our families and friends. You exterminated us one by one as we arrived, ambushing us, waiting for us to land on our colonies or home planets and then destroying them with one massive blast. How is this honorable?!"

Jusan said nothing. Trowa was ready to bet his life and his next five incarnations that the creature had no concept of the meaning of honor. Or of shame.

"So it was all a lie," Jusan concluded, turning towards Duo. "I'm impressed, worm. I didn't find the slightest trace of the removal of these memories in Wufei's mind, and I never guessed the reasons and beliefs I examined were false when I tested his loyalty to me."

"Yeah, well, you know, they're fairly primitive brutes." Duo did his elbows-up shrug. "What passes for a mind in your typical Dragon is pretty damn easy to manipulate."

Once more there was that twitch from the Dragon, but his eyes remained on Jusan.

"I see,” Jusan said, turning towards the Dragon again, dismissing Duo.

"Oh wait! I've not gotten to the best part yet!" Duo exclaimed. He seemed cock-a-hoop, but Trowa noticed the tightness around his eyes and the bead of sweat that trickled down his neck. The shaman glanced quickly at Heero behind him, measuring the power levels accumulated in the circle. A few more minutes yet. Duo, he gathered, wasn't trying to brag. He was desperately buying time, and, from the stress lines trembling around his tree of life, he wasn't sure it would be enough.

This puzzled Trowa. The Dragon was definitely not going to summon Jusan now, so what was worrying Duo? Weren't they home and dry? The twanging tension of the lines around them, tangling with Center's very fate, seemed to indicate that they weren't even close. Something bad was about to happen...

"I do not need your explanations," Jusan replied. He did not bother to glance at the braided man. Duo's eyes narrowed. "You forget that I have a mind older than even your race, and an intellect greater than the aggregated sentient minds of the galaxy-"

"Yes," Duo murmured, "and most of it has calcified from boredom eons ago. Admit it, Juusan. You screwed up." The joker's mask had slipped. Duo's eyes were cruel and cunning.

"Wufei." Jusan ignored Duo again. "Do not pay attention to this mad creature. You are being manipulated-"

"I'm well aware of that," the Dragon growled.

"Summon me. I promise you, I will kill him, then release you from our link. If you still want your revenge, then you know where to find me. But do not let the machinations of this foolish, desperate creature make you do anything-"

"You will not kill him," Wufei stated firmly.

There was the smallest instant of silence and Trowa wondered how puzzled Jusan must have been by that remark to let that second pass. "You are willing to let him live?"

"Hardly." Wufei got to his feet slowly and brushed his grimed hands on his armor. And he finally looked at Duo with eyes that were clearly measuring what size grave would be needed. Duo's eyebrows twitched. "I am going to kill this vermin. He used me, he... abused my mind in a moment of weakness, ripped out my memories when he'd promised to help me, and sent me crawling to my worst enemy. He's going to die, Jusan, in a worst way than you could ever imagine."

"I'd like to see you try," Duo muttered, but Wufei had already turned back towards Jusan.

"You, however... betrayed the trust of my people. And you committed a crime beyond any imaginable. You destroyed not only our clan, but our future. Taking out the Maxwell trash is personal-"

"Oi."

"Killing you is Justice. That is all I have to say."

"Isn't he sweet!" Duo grin looked a bit forced and his eyes had narrowed dangerously. "Such simple convictions. Mind like a marble." Twitch from the Dragon.

"But he was useful to my plans," Shinigami continued, looking at Jusan with that old, cruel expression again. "I knew you might send a herald to Center to eliminate anything that could possibly harm you before you even set foot on the planet. Until Fei showed up, I had no idea how to counter you if you did that. But then this lovely Dragon-" a small growl that Duo ignored "- just fell into my arms, and I had this brilliant idea. I know you employ some of his people still. And you needed someone strong to be your herald. I was willing to bet that if I sent him back, all primped up and begging to serve you-" once more that twitch, but Duo ignored that too "- you couldn't resist. What a magnificent herald, hm? All ready to serve. It was a gamble, but...what did I have to lose? If you sent someone else as herald, we were all screwed anyway, whether Fei was on our side or not."

If Jusan was listening to any of this, it wasn't apparent. He'd probably figured it out already. "Wufei, we are running out of time. Is that your final word? You will not be my herald?"

"No," Wufei ground out. He reached up to the chain around his neck and yanked it off without touching the medallion. Jusan watched it fall to the ground and sighed - the first sign of emotion Trowa had seen him make; regret.

"Well, you leave me no choice. I will not let this annoying shield be cast, and I have no time left to persuade you."

"He's too stubborn for that, believe me!" Duo chuckled. "He's more hard-headed than -"

They never heard what Duo's comparison would have been. The Dragon suddenly screamed, a horrible noise ripping from his throat like a death-cry.

Trowa's heart hammered wildly in his throat, and Quatre cried out and tottered, clawing at his temples. Trowa steadied him instinctively. He didn't need to ask what was affecting his lover. The contortions of the lines of fate were screaming in his brain almost as loudly as Chang. It was there, right in front of them: Center's immediate and impending doom. For Quatre, the patterns of death and destruction closing around them, seen through Zero's magnifying lens, must be crushing.

"What's going on?!" Fen shouted. He'd sunk to one knee. Chang had fallen onto his back, clutching his head, that scream still tearing from his soul.

"You bastard, Juusan!" Duo snarled. Trowa winced as the lashings of fury from the braided man's mind stung his raw nerves.

Duo didn't wait for Jusan's answer. He was already on his knees besides Wufei, and had placed a hand on the Dragon's forehead.

The horrible scream suddenly cut off. Black eyes blinked, blind still. The powerful frame was shaking, almost convulsing.

"Shhh." Duo's mouth was still twisted with anger. "Won't last long." He glared at Jusan. "I didn't think you'd actually do it. You've lost! The shield will be cast in only a few minutes! Give it up!"

"I've not lost." Jusan was unmoved, watching dispassionately as Wufei choked and writhed.

"What-... what is he doing?” Quatre gasped. He had his head in his hands, and lines of pain were carved into his forehead, blue eyes blinking dazedly. But the destructive power that had been surging through Wufei had stopped, Trowa realized.

"He's trying to force his way through the link!" Duo snapped. "I'm blocking him."

"Force-... his way-... "

"It's something he can do with the herald link, though nobody knows this. Well, no-one but us."

Duo didn't say who 'us' referred to. Trowa, looking at Duo's heart chakra, jagged with nearly insane hatred, somehow doubted the braided man had meant himself and Jusan, or was referring to the tiny stone creature clinging precariously to his shoulder, who'd been making faces at Jusan since it had landed there.

"We learned first-hand that the herald link is not as consenting as the Scourge pretends it is," Duo continued, spitting out the words as if they burned his throat. "I guess he'd find it harder to get volunteers if he told them they could end up like this." Duo glanced down at the shivering man he'd propped up against his knee and chest, while he kept the black-gloved hand on Wufei's forehead. Trowa could see strange lines crawling around that point of contact; Duo was using his Mark and physical touch to counter whatever was happening.

"The herald can summon Juusan and become a conduit for his power, once he accepts the link. Or Juusan can barge his way through it and take possession of the herald. Destroying his mind and soul in the process." Duo put another hand almost protectively around the Dragon's shoulder to keep him from sliding from his position as the young man shuddered.

Jusan was - no surprise there - unperturbed. "Yes. That is unfortunate. I really did not want to lose Wufei. But I have no choice. And since you are still blocking my link, I will have to destroy your mind and soul first. That is something I do not find unfortunate at all," Jusan added.

"Keep on trying." Duo smiled. But the jester's grin was a bit ragged. Trowa noted that Duo was under considerable strain, his tanned skin was pale with a sheen of sweat on his forehead.

"How long do you think you can last, little dirt-crawler? The high Lords of your race tried to block me like this, six years ago. They lasted only a few seconds before I crushed their minds like glass and destroyed you all." Jusan spoke softly, with an edge of menace.

"You're an idiot, Juusan." Duo's grin was starting to resemble a skull's. But the fire in his eyes was only growing. "You took us by surprise last time. There were only a dozen Lords there to stop you. Powerful, granted, but nowhere near enough."

"And now I'm facing a mere child."

_"Now you're facing all of us.”_

Duo’s voice had changed. So had his appearance. His skin-tight clothes were flowing in that strangely organic way Trowa had noted last time. But they didn't form his sleek battle-suit, or his ragged leathers.

Quatre made a noise in his throat, something between distress and revulsion, and Trowa tasted the edge of death and madness that was finally piercing through the mask; the real Shi No Kami. Besides them, Fen gasped. A whirr of gray shot away from the changing figure, darted behind Quatre and clung to the healer's jerkin, peaking worriedly at its master over his shoulder.

Duo's body was encased in darkness. In places it looked as sleek and solid as a scorpion's carapace, in others it drifted, transient as pyre smoke. It grew, it writhed... Trowa could feel the power exuding from the near-sentient thing and its master - but he could also feel the power of Jusan that Duo was opposing in the battle-ground of Wufei's mind. The shaman realized this was Duo's last stand, his final defenses revealed, his ultimate bid to stop Jusan from coming through and materializing his power here, on Center.

The... thing that cloaked him - it wasn't armor, like Wing and Shenlong. It had echoes of Duo's pattern, like a faint clone of his soul, simpler... and twisted. It slithered down his braid like a snake. Reared protectively over his head. Shaping itself into a helm. Trowa gasped and recoiled as a jagged ebony fang darted down - and sliced into Duo's face. Duo smiled like a corpse. Other prongs, on his shoulders, his wrists, were also rising, spiking, and sometimes turning on their owner and drawing blood.

"I see." Jusan sounded completely analytical. "You must have been young when this happened. The toll on your mind must have been considerable."

 

 _"Juusan... "_ The voice had... echoes. It was as cold as crypts. Trowa shuddered. Then it was just Duo's voice. "Worry less about my mind and more about your ass, Juusan. I'm about to hand it to you."

"Really." Jusan glanced at Wufei - who cried and curled up further, trembling, in the protection of Duo's arms. He didn't react to the odd shape of the creature holding him, or to the spikes on Duo's wrist that eagerly snatched at his clothes and pierced his skin. Trowa wondered how much he was aware of the titanic battle taking place in his mind, trying to rip it apart, and felt a stab of pity for the man who'd planned to kill them all.

Duo had hunched over painfully when Jusan had renewed his attack - but the armor that protected and hurt his body seemed to rise to the challenge. His braid was almost encased in chitin-like darkness, its end curving up into a scorpion's tail. The spikes twisted, grew, forming strange, knotted shapes; like the lines of a protective charm, Trowa suddenly realized. Blood trickled down Duo's face from the shard plunging over one of his eyes to carve his cheek - a strange symmetry to Chang's efforts to resist him earlier. His eyes were almost shut in pain, but the power was still there, opposing Jusan every inch of the way.

"I don't get it," Fen muttered. He was sweating, tracking with his mind, like Trowa and Quatre, the invisible struggle unfolding before them. "If Maxwell had this kind of power, if he could block the herald's link from the start... why go through all that? Why let the Dragon punch him around?"

"The question, immortal one... " Fen's head shot up and he stared at Jusan, who was looking calmly at Duo while his mind cruelly pounded the young man. "The real question you should be asking is, how long can he block me?"

"Aah... ahhhahaha... " Duo's laugh was almost a cry of pain, but he still lifted his head. "I-... know-... the answer-... "

"Yes, you do. Another twenty more seconds, I'd say." 

"Wrong! The answer-... " Duo gasped in pain and then grinned like a demon. "The answer is-... long enough!"

His hand shot away from Wufei's shoulder to point behind Trowa and Quatre. The lovers turned to follow the gesture -

Heero, on his knees in the circle behind them, twitched. Then gasped and threw his head and arms back in a gesture of release.

Something moved...

Only a small fraction of the released power leaked from Svale's circle, but it was enough to knock them all off of their feet. And the entire planet reverberated, an intense rolling peal of thunder that started in the Sanctuary. It flattened them, a pressure wave that then rolled out over the hills and into the distance.

The silence... well, this silence had been through hell and back and was cowering behind one of the sanctuary's stones, wishing to be left alone, please.

Trowa was the first to recover. Unlike Svale's first experiment with the shield, there had been no agonizing build-up of power, slowly squeezing his head in a vice. This time, it'd just crushed him quickly and cleanly. He thought the headache was there to stay, and he'd probably be handing it down to his children and grandchildren, assuming he ever had any. But at least he could move, and think, and worry.

He gasped as he felt Quatre in his arms. His lover was - Trowa's vision was warped, as if he were looking at the world through someone's borrowed glasses, but he could tell something wasn't right. Quatre's lines were jangled and severely misaligned. As he watched, they slowly gathered into something approaching their normal pattern but they were still off, out of synch.

"Too much... too much... Zero... shut up... .shut-... .shut up shut up shut-" Quatre whimpered.

Trowa glanced around him helplessly. Fen was sitting up, but his eyes were so wide that his ice-blue irises were rimmed with white, and a glance told Trowa he'd be no help. Heero was, no surprise there, crumpled into a little heap in the center of the circle and Trowa just hoped he was still alive.

Behind Trowa, the Dragon was sitting up, shaking his head and looking dazed. Surprisingly, he seemed the better off. Duo, next to him, was curled up into a fetal ball, clutching one hand over his head and the other to his stomach. His eyes were screwed shut. The armor that had previously carved and covered him was now a melted puddle of shadow painfully dragging itself together to form a rough cloak.

And Jusan was still there. Trowa stared at him for a horrified heartbeat. Then realized that the image was fainter, and flickering. The coils of power reaching out to crush them had disappeared.

Finally Trowa glanced at the sky.

Someone had spilled oil in the puddle of blue above the ragged clouds. It shifted, writhing like Aurora Borealis, only faintly discernible but present, on a scale so big it made his mind ache. The iridescence would be cast like a net around the entire planet.

"Focus." Quatre's voice sounded suddenly clear and as cold as a computer's. "Reroute. Neutralize that area. Turn - turn that down. Cut-...There. Functions restored."

Quatre straightened up and calmly glanced around. Too calmly. Trowa felt a shiver of pain in his overburdened mind as he noted how completely Zero's patterns were covering his lover's.

"What happened?" he whispered.

"The shield spell," Quatre answered, his voice devoid of emotion. His eyes were darting around, weighing everything they saw, fitting it all into a coherent pattern - Jusan, Duo, the recovering Dragon, Heero, Fen, the sickening sheen in the sky. "It caused a power surge in Zero. Then it reduced its mana input, which made its control erratic. It's become hard to manage without added functionality."

Trowa just stared at him.

"It's all right." The healer had neatly fitted him into the pattern along with the others, but seemed to have noted his distress. "This shutdown of certain functions will only last until my mind can assimilate the changes in power and probability calculations."

"Oh," Trowa said, since something appeared to be expected of him. Quatre's reassurances, if that was what they were, had been said in the same tone of voice as an analysis of the chemical composition of the human brain.

"Duo. Are you alright?" Quatre asked, turning away from the shaman.

Duo had unrolled himself a bit. "Oooooh...that was a fucking kick in the nuts," he muttered."I think 'm gonna throw up... "

"What's wrong with him?" Trowa asked weakly.

"Duo's spirit armor and mindset are entirely magical," Quatre answered, still in that same, analytical tone. "Any magic user on the planet will be feeling the effects of the dampening field right now. The more powerful they are, the worse their magical abilities will be compromised - their mana pool reduced while their control only gets weaker and more erratic. This results in power surges, spell misfires and severe disorientation. Anyone more reliant on technology will be relatively unaffected."

He was looking at the Dragon as he spoke. The young man had staggered to his feet and was standing before Jusan's image, shaking with the after-effects of his ordeal, or maybe with fury.

"What is it you hope to accomplish... Jishin... "

Jusan's voice was hard to hear, it echoed and crackled. Chang suddenly straightened up and took step back as he realized his enemy was quite out of reach for now.

"Well... " Duo sat up slowly and with visible pain. He looked a bit green, but the smile was back in place. "I'm hoping that when you come here, you'll feel a hundred times more shitty than I feel right now. It's a fate I would wish on my worst enemy."

"I should have exterminated you all when I had the chance." Still so unemotional. He's not human, Trowa reminded himself. He doesn't know what emotions are, perhaps. Wait... Jishin?!

"Yes. Yes, you should have." Duo slowly got to his feet, apparently recovering. "But you missed me. Pity, right? You killed all the Jishin in one fell blow, but you missed a miserable little snot-nosed fifteen-year-old kid. But that's the kicker, isn't it. You never deal with just one Jishin. Because of the way the souls of our dead pass to the living. As long as just one of us remains, then the memories and powers of the previous generation - all of the Jishin who ever existed - will end up in the survivor's mind. You're facing all of us, Immortal Juusan. The concentrated power of an extremely powerful race." Duo smiled predatorily.

"I exterminated all of you - bar one - once, I'll do it again," Jusan announced calmly.

"We'll be right here. Waiting." Duo's eyes gleamed with the chaos of a multitude of souls screaming for revenge.

"And what do you hope, Jishin? Do you think that this- " Jusan gestured towards the shimmering sky "- will stop me? It won't. It will barely slow me down while I kill you all in a manner that has not been seen since this universe was created. I will be here soon, worm. I will be here in a few months - the blink of an eye for a creature such as myself -"

"Yes, and for every second of that time, you'll be afraid," Duo whispered, a mad grin on his face. "You can't know for sure what the shield will do to you. You can't be sure we can't keep you from your Source. You can't be sure we won't kill you, Juusan. Welcome to the passage of time, Immortal one. I hope it makes you die a million times over. It still won't be enough."

Trowa looked away from that insane smile, echoing with the vicious hate of a legion of the dead, to find that Jusan had disappeared. His last tenuous hold on his illusion had finally been eaten away by the interference from the shield.

Or maybe he'd felt a touch of fear...

Duo turned towards them and clapped his hands. "Right! Now we have to get busy! Not much time left, as the Scourge so kindly reminded me. Wow, that was close though! He was a hell of a lot stronger than I thought he'd be. Stone and bone, if he'd stopped all that talking just one minute sooner- good thing he's rather fond of you, Dragon! If he hadn't been so hesitant to destroy you... if he'd tried to possess you right away, instead of jawing on about it, we'd all be dead."

Duo's voice was loud in the silence of the Sanctuary - no birds sang, no insects hummed, they'd all been cowed by the world-shaking sound. Trowa's senses, especially his Nightwalker vision, felt dull and difficult to use. As if the shield, arching lazily across the ionosphere, was drowning them in some imperceptible white noise. Center’s lines were thrumming like gigantic guitar strings. His head still ached. He noticed the Dragon had stiffened, and stopped staring at the empty space where Jusan had been, to turn towards Duo slowly.

"We have a chance, now," Duo continued, smiling fiercely and rubbing his hands. "The shield will cut down the Scourge's power considerably. And I think there's a few more tricks I can pull on that miserable bastard. To start with, I've arranged quite a welcoming committee. Heero will fight him because he wants to keep Wing. Fen- if you want that stone thingy back, you'll have to help us. Wufei, well, that goes without saying. Quatre - Zero should tell you-"

Wufei burst out laughing. It was a strange sound in the muffled silence beneath the scintillating sky, fey and wild. It sounded like a release, a shout of liberation.

He was still smiling fiercely when he turned and threw himself at Duo, Shenlong crackling with furious energy.

 

Next Chapter: Truth

In which a Dragon acts like a Dragon, and Duo has to cope


	30. Truth

Quatre closed his eyes. That only made it worse. He no longer knew who was listing: him or Center.

When Heero had released the energy he'd accumulated, a part of that power had surged through Zero. The shield had covered the planet the next moment, dampening all magic; Quatre had momentarily lost a good part of his control over Zero as a result. The double blow had caused a severe disruption in the delicate balance between the spell and its owner. Zero was threading through his brain like cracks lancing through a sheet of glass under stress. Everywhere he looked it had splintered, changed or destroyed parts of his pattern and mental functions.

Zero had been programmed to not overly disrupt its host's mind. So it was now holding most of Quatre together in something resembling his previous mental setup, and using up most of its resources - and his - trying to repair the damage. The part of Quatre that was Quatre was slowly coming back online. It was... frightening. To think his mind and essence were so easily broken and recomposed by Zero; that a spell/program could slot bits of him in and out of his head and he'd still be whole.

Even more frightening was the thought that Zero might not get it all right. That it might not put him back the way he was before. If that were the case... would he even know?

It _should_ have been a frightening thought, but Quatre was completely and clinically removed from all this. His emotional reactions had had to be shut down, to avoid pain and panic interfering with Zero's reconstitutions. Detached, he scanned Zero's work, its attempts to glue back the pieces. It looked like he wasn't going to go insane just yet. Zero was doing its best, and seemed to be making headway. But it was, for lack of a better word, distracted.

Zero was trying to tell him something. If a spell could wave its arms around and scream hysterically, that was what Zero was doing. It was pointing to a subroutine that Quatre had set up weeks ago to read the lines of fate. It was one of several that were running constantly in his mind, trying to predict the damage to Center after Jusan was defeated, integrating every new variable as they appeared. These results were input into the greater set of calculations that went to figuring out how to defeat the Scourge in the first place. The idea was that if there were ever a choice between methods to beat the bastard, Zero could tell him instantly which plan would cause the least collateral damage.

Apparently one of those subroutines, a long-term consequence calculator, had been accidentally boosted by the massive power surge just as the shield started to be cast. It had jolted Zero down a strange avenue and given it an insight into some future danger. Zero was ringing several alarm bells about its findings.

Quatre heard his own voice reassure Trowa, distantly. In his mind - time had slowed to a crawl - he was tracking the repairs to the damage. When it seemed that most of his normal functions would recuperate eventually, he turned towards the subroutine's calculations, to see what were these results that had sent Zero into a twitter.

_*Computation DamageControl04: Alarm - 9.73. Probably rating - extremely high (94.6%). Result of Computation: The universe will end in 10 billion years.*_

A second passed - a huge lapse of time in the mental space in which Quatre conversed with Zero.

He looked at the result.

Another second passed.

He looked at it again.

It hadn't changed.

...Ten billion years... riiiiiiight...

Apparently the power surge had sent Zero a little further into the future than he was used to setting it. The most he'd been able to predict before -and had ever been interested in - had been a few months.

Zero was very concerned about this coming event. Quatre supposed that a spell had no concept of practicality. Zero rated dangers according to their probability, gravity and how soon they were likely to happen. Ten billion years was a bloody long time, but then again the end of the universe was sufficiently certain and serious that it had upped the priority.

Quatre triggered the reset program on the subroutine - the poetically named Dump That And Try Again; such lyricists, those Jishin. Jusan should be their first priority, and he'd worry about the end of the universe in the extremely unlikely event he was still around in ten billion years' time.

_*Reset aborted due to alarm level + links to parent computations.*_

What?

_*Analysis: Routines involving [Jusan] part of the calculations. Link confirmed.*_

A link? Between Jusan and the end of the universe in ten billion years?

Zero was very affirmative about this.

...Oh brother. Quatre sighed internally and triggered another override to at least get rid of the alarms. Jusan was immortal, he reasoned. Which meant that, theoretically speaking, he would be around at the end of the universe in ten billion years time. That was not very hopeful for their current endeavor, but he really didn’t think that it needed immediate attention-

A blur of probability went up in his head like fireworks blossoming. Quatre took one look at the calculation, and realized there was no way he'd ever be able to integrate the full conclusions that Zero had arrived at under that power surge. Hell, it would give even a Jishin mystic a massive aneurysm. Quatre didn't stand a chance. He winced as Zero raised a few more alarms. The spell tried to break it down into chunks that it hoped Quatre could understand.

Quatre winced again, and triggered a few more analysis and pain response programs. The conclusions were no clearer. Somehow, Jusan, the end of the universe in ten billion years, the Source Of All Things and a threat to humanity were all linked together, and Zero was going bananas over it. But he was no closer to understanding what-

The healer paused and checked the results again. The... Source Of All Things? What was that? That wasn't any parametrical object he was familiar with.

In a series of blurs and flashes, Zero tried to stuff a lot of information into a mere human brain. During the power surge, at that nexus of probabilities where the entire future had been spinning like a bottle, Zero had put two and two together and ended up with a couple of trillion, and this 'Source Of All Things' was apparently part of it.

Look, this is getting us nowhere, Quatre snapped mentally - another few seconds had trickled by, and he was listening half-attentively to Duo saying they'd all just had a close call. Zero! Reset the calculation and retrace it slowly. Then maybe I can follow you this time.

Zero sparkled and stuttered in his thoughts, then admitted that that was no longer possible. Its ability to read and manipulate the lines of the future had dwindled due to the planetary shield; the calculation had been the result of a freak occurrence anyway. It couldn't begin to retrace its own equations.

This Source Of All Things - maybe Zero meant Center, Quatre hazarded. She was the planet of Sources. Center had been part of the alarm that Zero had tried to raise in his mind, he'd figured out that much. Well, Center was certainly in mortal danger, and it was going to come to a head a lot sooner than ten billion years - more like five months, the time for Jusan to arrive. As for the rest of the weird result... maybe Zero had gotten its mystical wires crossed. No matter.

Quatre isolated a few more subroutines, ruthlessly shunted the odd calculation into memory storage for later analysis - or deletion - and concentrated again on the here and now, or what passed for such when he had Zero squatting in his head. That meant that the 'here and now' was a muddy mixture of past, present and future, composed of the knowledge of Jusan fuming back on Libra, of Trowa's aching pain and concern, and the argument he and Quatre would soon have that would rip them apart, of Wufei's chillingly free laugh, the fact he was going to try to kill Duo in the next 5.16 seconds, and the headache that was trying to nibble away at Quatre's sanity.

The healer wondered briefly how painful it would be to blow one’s brains out, then concentrated once more on the action, in time to watch the beautiful punch Chang landed on Duo, who'd turned just as it was coming. Quatre winced and grinned at the same time, still pretty confused himself about his feelings towards the braided man.

Duo landed on the ground with an 'oof!' and stared up at Chang with a dazed look. It transformed quickly into alarm as the Dragon reached for him, hauled him up by the scruff of his whatever-it-was-he-was-wearing, and lifted his other fist back.

"I am going to enjoy this-" the Dragon hissed, with considerable lack of foresight in Quatre's opinion. A second later, Chang shouted in pain and fell back, scrabbling at the red-hot glow of the Mark on his forehead. Quatre sighed; in the past ten minutes, Chang had been kicked around by some of the strongest powers in the known galaxy, he couldn’t be blamed for having lost sight of small details like a Mark of control on his forehead.

Faint flickering lines of thought-feeling-emotions-intent made Quatre frown slowly... made him wonder if the Dragon had forgotten about the mark. Or if-

Lines snared the two men in the healer's eyes, tightening like a noose.

Shit.

Quatre, mind in the present and the future, bit his lip as Chang straightened, shook his head once, then attacked with just about the same dogged stubbornness.

"Hey!" Duo snapped, dodging - and then dodging again, as Wufei spun and tried to backhand him. "Wh- what do you think - " he leaned away from a blow, and fell back a couple of feet.

"Stop that, you stupid brute!" he snarled, and his hand shot up, palm out. Wufei stopped as if he'd walked into a wall. The mark on his forehead smoldered.

"What do you think you're playing at?! The Mark has an inbuilt trigger! Every time you hit me, it punches back! Or are you too dumb to notice?!" Duo felt gingerly at a welt on the side of his cheek that was starting to swell.

"I noticed," Chang ground out. And took a step forward.

Duo's eyes widened, his fingers dropping from his jaw. The thong in his hair twitched and curled down to cover the forming bruise. Quatre watched, with his eyes and Zero's analytical lens, as the armor, a materialization of Duo's magic and spirit, started repairing the minor damage to his body. So that's what the Jishin's mythical glass armor was all about...

Chang took another step. He looked like he was fighting against slowly snapping restraints, struggling towards Duo. The Jishin took a half-step back and glared.

"Fei, what do you think you're doing?" he ground out, voice dangerous.

"I'm trying to kill you. Guess you aren't as smart as you think you are if you haven't figured that out yet." Wufei's lips twisted with effort, his voice strained but without hesitation.

"I can't believe it! Rocks are smarter than you! No offense, imp." The tiny creature, which had stayed on Quatre's shoulder, shuddering from the aftershock of the spell, gave a small, dismissive 'meep'. "Let me spell it - no, let me _draw_ it out for you! I - control - you!'

"Let me hammer it into your skull," Wufei countered grimly. And leaped the last few feet towards his prey. "No-one -"

\- a punch towards Duo's face, Duo dodged -

"-controls -"

\- backhand whipping back towards Duo's temple, blocked by a black-clad forearm-

"-me!"

Wufei's fist darted forward again so quickly Quatre blinked. The punch landed this time, on Duo's shoulder, causing him to stumble back a few steps, while Wufei fell to the ground on the blow's momentum, momentarily stunned by the counter-reaction from the Mark of control. But he was staggering back to his feet again in a few seconds.

Duo was standing still. But his armor was moving. It coiled, not as frightening as when he faced Jusan, but plating Duo's usual sleek battle-suit with what looked to be slabs of black glass. His long gloves became hard and taloned, a breastplate solidified over his chest, dipped down over his abdomen, and the ragged leather thong around his head slithered and stretched and hardened into something like Trowa's headband, but with the smooth sheen of glass.

"You... primitive... " Duo's eyes were narrowed and the ever-present one-sided grin was a curved blade. "Even if you didn't have the Mark of control, I would have nothing to fear from you. It took over a dozen Dragons to defeat just one of my kind-"

"-back in the good old days when our armors were a lot less sophisticated, you mean," Wufei interrupted with a trickle of that dangerous laughter again. He held up a hand before his chest and a spark of energy danced. He watched it glow for a few seconds then looked up, arrogance and deadly challenge in every line of his face. "Shenlong is ten times better than those old prototypes we were using fifty years ago, when we slaughtered the tail-ends of your kin fleeing back to their lair on the planet of bones."

From his spot half-way across the cirque, Quatre could still see the muscles clench in Duo's jaw.

"And here's an additional thought... " Wufei sprung to the attack, sending the little blade of energy slicing towards Duo, and following through immediately.

"I can't help noticing- " Wufei sent another little blaze Duo's way, to keep the man dodging- " - that you're not teleporting out of danger this time!"

"If you think I'm running from you-" Duo swatted the blast out of the air with his gloved hand, then dodged the blow - "you're fucking delusional."

"Is that so?" Wufei spun, twisted, crouched and sent one leg scything out into Duo's. With a curse in the old tongue that would have cracked stone back in the days of Power, Duo fell to the ground with a thump. Wufei lifted his fist then staggered back, the Mark of control blazing like a red-hot iron on his forehead. Duo scrambled up and stepped back, scowling. Wufei stayed bent over, hands on his forehead and blood pouring from his nose again. But when he lifted his head, he was grinning through the pain. He crooked a thumb upwards, towards the sky swimming with faint rainbows.

"You sure _that_ doesn't have anything to do with the fact you aren't teleporting?"

Duo's face gave nothing away. "A minor hindrance."

"Oh really?" Wufei laughed, it was that creepy one again. "You don't mind if I put that to the test, do you?" He moved forward once more.

"Baraksaa! This is going to kill you!" Duo shouted, flushing with fury.

"So be it," Wufei replied philosophically. "I'd rather die than live a slave, and if I can take you with me, I'll be dying with honor." A clawed fist whistled towards Duo's head, and Wufei followed after it.

"Wheee! That made me feel like I was four hundred again!" Svale popped up besides Quatre as if she'd sprung out of the ground. Quatre couldn't remember now when she'd left, he'd been too busy concentrating on Duos' fight with the Dragon - their first fight, that is, when Chang was attacking the Sanctuary. He knew that Svale would go - despite the risk - to the heart of the sanctuary, to be ready to cast the shield spell once Heero had fed the power into the cirque. Which meant she'd been at ground zero of the reverberation; Quatre looked at her, assessing. Her hair was standing on end, her eyes were slightly crossed, she was staggering, and she was shouting as if she'd become quite deaf, but she seemed otherwise undamaged. 

"Hey guys! What's going on? Why's the Dragon still alive? Did I really feel Jusan's presence here just a moment ago? Aren't you happy I was ready with that shield and stopped the big guy from appearing? And incidentally what's a supposedly extinct Jishin in spirit armor doing here - fuck me, it's Maxie!"

"Your powers of summation are fantastic as always, Svale," Quatre muttered sardonically. "As to what Duo is doing... he's trying not to get killed by Chang, I'd say."

"Why's that pretty Dragon staggering about like he's drunk? Did he get into my stash? Dammit Rabbit, I left you in charge up here, I expected you to defend the Sanctuary and all its contents!"

Quatre rubbed at his temples - strangely enough, the headache didn't go away - and decided not to go into any more explanations. He distantly heard Trowa crouch next to Svale and outline the situation hurriedly, and was remotely thankful for it. Zero was drawing many ugly futures before his eyes; the fate of Center and a lot more hinged on this confrontation between the last High Dragon and the last Jishin, and what Quatre would say or do to manipulate the outcome...

Wufei, his face white with strain, trapped Duo briefly in an arm wrenching hold. Duo broke away and struck back, a swift blow that left deep scratch marks across Shenlong's chest plate. Wufei spun from the blow and kicked, driving him back again. The Dragon was visibly less hindered by the pain now; he was overcoming it, even as it slowly killed him.

Quatre caught the blur of grey by a hind leg before it could get out of arm's reach.

"No, stay here."

"But he's attacking my master!"

Quatre glanced at the lines and patterns of the simple but loyal creature he was firmly holding. "I know you want to help Duo, but you'd be better off staying away. You'd only distract him, and you can't do anything against the Dragon."

"But someone has to help him!"

Quatre glanced up at the fight wearily. Duo was back to dodging, and swearing like a sailor. With the Mark of control, he could probably kill Chang pretty damn easily; the thought was cold and analytical in Quatre's mind. Zero was shuffling through the lines of the future, showing the various ways out of this new dilemma. As well as the consequences... Quatre sighed and looked down at the golem.

"I'll see what I can do. Here, Trowa-" he held the little creature out to the shaman, "- watch him, make sure he doesn't interfere."

The creature looked at Trowa. Trowa looked at the creature. They both showed a remarkable lack of enthusiasm for the idea, but Trowa, with a shrug, cupped his hands and the golem, grimacing atrociously, hopped into them.

"I'll hold on to him - it, but I'm coming with you," Trowa added in a voice that brooked no dissension. "Fen?"

"I... am... really... going to have to... kill that bastard... "

"You with us?" Trowa asked, his eyes deepening to forest green with sympathy. Quatre could see the damage to the Phoenix's mind much better than the shaman could, but what sympathy he felt was distant, and overlain with plans on how to use Fen despite the injury...

"I'm with you," Fen grunted. He still looked dazed. "About several million lifetimes' worth."

"Not getting any better, is it?"

"Oh it is. I am no longer firmly persuaded we are several thousand years in the past. I think I remember yesterday, too. I sort of remember Juusan. I definitely remember that bastard Shi No Kami. What's going on?"

"I guess we're going to find out," Trowa answered laconically as he followed Quatre’s sudden sure steps towards the confrontation. He didn’t argue this time, didn’t try to hold the healer back, though he followed in his footsteps...Quatre shoved the 'Trowa' question away for now, but he knew it was going to be an issue soon.

He had changed. Zero had instituted more mutations while reconstructing Quatre's mind, to allow him to handle Zero with less power and more finesse than previously, and compensate for the effects of the shield. The new programs were actually helping with the pain behind his eyes, and his hold on the lines of the future had returned. What else they'd done - and what else they might have taken away from him - remained to be seen later. He seemed to be more lucid, and his emotions were still there, not locked up but colder, more detached. This was good in a way. The breaking point of the future, that would cement them into a force to defeat Jusan or rip them apart, was nearly upon them and Quatre had to be clear-headed, unimpeded by emotions and ready to say what had to be said. He walked towards Duo and Wufei, with Trowa, Fen and Svale behind him.

Wufei's face was pale and tight with pain. He was suffering, but he was definitely pushing Duo back. Quatre waited a few seconds - Duo's next move would be useful to calm them both down a bit.

Duo snarled, dodged a blow by ducking down to one knee, and slammed his hands on the ground.

There was a tremendous crack and the cirque shook, sending the watchers staggering. Two slabs of rock shot up from the ground, and curved roughly around Wufei, two prongs holding him like pinchers.

"This is your wake-up call, buddy," Duo snapped as he stood up again. "Don't let my little show of fighting you earlier fool you! I was seriously holding back to avoid having you summon Juusan. I couldn't use magic because the power signature of my race is pretty damn unmistakable, and I didn't want to alert the Scourge. But now!" Duo fingers twitched and the rock groaned. Wufei, who'd been struggling to free his torso from the slabs of rock holding him, froze. "Now the gloves are off. The shield takes a bit out of me, but what's left is pretty fucking powerful and not something you should be messing with."

"Oh?" Wufei looked remarkably unimpressed. "Tell me, do you qualify as the Lord of a Trickster house now?"

Duo's eyebrows shot up, visibly startled by the question, as well as the novelty of that thought. "Ah well, yes, I guess. I mean, yes! House Maxwell. One of the oldest of the Elsire court."

"Oh good," Wufei said, "I'd always regretted that Jusan had exterminated you all without affording me the chance of measuring myself against a Jishin Lord."

Duo's furious response was interrupted by another crack of stone - one that was not caused by his Jishin magic over earth and rock, if the look of surprise on his face was any indication.

A noise like a lightning strike, a smell of burnt tin and hot rock. Quatre lowered the protective arm he'd had over his eyes for the last few seconds in anticipation, knowing that Chang would flex Shenlong's shield and blow his stone prison to bits.

"You really are stubborn," Duo muttered, glaring at the figure sparkling with energy whose boots crunched over rubble as he approached.

"You have no idea."

"I'm going to do something really stupid and appeal to your common sense," Duo snapped. "Don't you realize that you need my help to defeat Juusan when he arrives?"

"I'll defeat him when he arrives, or die trying. Of my own volition, not as your puppet, and certainly not with your help," Wufei replied in a soft voice. Crunch. A pebble split under his armored foot.

Duo took a languid step back, keeping some distance between them, though his lazily crossed arms indicated that he was only doing so to be able to talk for a few more seconds, not out of fear. "You can't get through your thick skull that we need to fight together to defeat the Scourge?"

"That will never happen." 

"Oh, Ch'so! I give up! Quatre! You tell him!"

"He's right," Quatre sighed, placing himself at a prudent distance from the two.

"There! See?" Duo turned back to Wufei with a triumphant smile. "This guy's a seer-"

"I was talking to you, Duo," Quatre interrupted coldly. "The Dragon is right."

He finally had their attention. Wufei stopped his slow, murderous advance - and swayed with pain as the momentum of his fury abated. Duo boggled at the healer. Before exploding.

"Nai?! What are you- has your Zero run out of batteries or something?! Do you think you fools have a chance against Juusan without me?!"

Quatre stuck his hands on his hips, and waited 4.2 seconds, the exact length of silence needed to catch Duo's attention without giving him the chance to marshal more arguments. Zero was a monstrous pain in the ass, but it did give you some good conversational tools.

"Maybe we can defeat Jusan without you, Duo, and maybe not. There are too many variables for even Zero to determine. But we both know one thing: we can't trust you. You only care about defeating the Scourge."

"Damn right!"

"That means you'll sacrifice any of us to achieve this," Quatre pursued relentlessly. "And, more importantly, you'd turn the entire planet into a deathtrap if you could, blow up Center herself and damn the consequences, if it gave you half a chance at your goal."

Fleeting feelings passed over Duo's face, but his words sounded unhesitant. "Damn right again! I want justice, to borrow a phrase. Actually, that's not right. I want bloody revenge! The bloodier the better!"

"At whatever the cost?"

"I paid a high price already." Duo's short words dropped like dead bones at the bottom of a well. "I killed many, I stole, I lied, I paid with my body and my blood, and I'll keep on paying for as long as it takes."

"Let me rephrase that," Quatre continued patiently. "At whatever the cost to others?"

"I'm ready to sacrifice anybody I need to." Duo's eyes narrowed.

"We were willing to die to stop Jusan, so we could accept that. But are you willing to sacrifice what my friends and I are fighting _for?_ How far will you go? How many people will have to die to avenge the fallen Jishin, Duo? Will you be willing to sacrifice the whole of Center? Our entire civilization?" Quatre's words were carefully measured strikes.

Duo looked terribly torn, as if a part of him wanted to say no, and another part wanted to say ‘damn right!’ "I-... I wouldn't-"

Quatre hardly needed Zero's help to guess the origin of the conflict that was cleaving the Jishin apart. "The dead don't have any pity for the living, do they," he said softly, and suddenly Quatre realized he wasn't angry with Duo anymore, not even for what had almost happened to Trowa. The man had used Quatre and hurt them, but he used and hurt himself so much more severely. "I think...I think you do have limits, Duo Maxwell, to what you're willing to do - not to yourself, maybe, but to others at least. Actually, I think you'd even prefer to take the fighting and bleeding upon yourself, so others don't have to pay for your revenge. Part of you might even regret having used us so far, even Chang." The Dragon, who'd been staring at Duo like a dog stares at a rat, glanced at Quatre in surprise, immediately followed by a snort of irritation at the healer's presumption.

"But...the problem is, we can't trust you, Duo," Quatre continued, quietly but firmly. "You've actually told us you're willing to sacrifice what we're willing to die to protect. Even if you negotiate, even if you tell us that you will join our cause to ensure our cooperation... We can't know that it's you talking, the man who has some heart, some compassion - maybe more than he needs - or the vengeful dead, who wouldn't hesitate to lie, manipulate us and sacrifice anything and anybody to get satisfaction."

Duo stared at him, then licked his lips.

"I speak only for myself." His voice was hoarse, and edged with bitterness. "Now that Juusan’s popped back off to outer space, they’re not using me as their sock puppet anymore. They’ve almost entirely shut up, they don’t care what any of you apes do, they’re waiting for the bloody finale."

His mouth twisted, and Quatre could follow some of the lines snaking through his soul. That multitude of voices must be hard to bear... almost as hard as the loneliness that had been amplified by their sudden silence.

"Quatre... I need-... we need to-... " he trailed off and his jaws clenched in frustration.

"You see our problem?" Quatre looked at him searchingly. "What can you say, Duo. What can you say to us now that could make us trust you?"

"Nothing. You lied," Wufei whispered. His eyes were once more fixed on the braided man, and he was talking to him as if they were alone on the planet. "You said... you promised you'd help me when I was injured, you offered-... and you lied and you used me."

Duo shrugged carelessly, but Quatre noticed a small scrawl of regret cross the patterns of a mind colored with both cruelty and compassion, as paradoxical as its owner.

"I know how slim the chances are of defeating Jusan without you," Quatre continued. "I know you won't be able to beat him either, alone."

"So you'd rather gamble that you can take on Juusan by yourself, than trust me? Are you insane?" Duo merely sounded weary.

"In the heat of battle, if you can't count on your allies, they are worse than useless," Wufei pointed out coldly.

Duo glared at him, clearly frustrated. Then he stared once more at Quatre, waiting for support. "Think carefully, Winner. You can probably calculate to the tenth percentile exactly how stupid this idea of us not joining forces is. Is this what Zero tells you? Does it have any arguments I could use to convince you guys not to commit suicide?"

Quatre ignored the brash tone, knowing what Duo was really asking; what does Zero suggest I do.

"Zero is an abacus. It's a spell built like a computer." Quatre's voice became cold and hard. "It's not up to making moral decisions. You have to take those on your own."

He turned away. Zero was telling him he was being stupid; the Jishin was a powerful ally, one he should definitely get on his side. There were ways to ensure that Duo would do what they said, and would not betray them. Zero was giving him several options in a hopeful manner, and Quatre ignored it. Because the healer didn't want Zero to suggest something to Duo that the Jishin would accept out of desperation.

Quatre was - despite everything - still Quatre. He believed, deeply and fundamentally, in people. He wanted to think that deep under Duo's thirst for revenge, his ruthless manipulations, his cruelty, there was still someone worth taking a risk for; someone who could make the right choice for the right reasons. He wanted to give Duo a chance to come to them and meet them on equal terms if possible. Not force him to fight like he'd tried to force them. What could Duo say or do to gain their trust... ? That remained to be seen. But if it was his choice, his decision and his achievement, Quatre thought it would be better all around.

Of course, the healer wasn't stupid, either. If Duo couldn't figure it out, or decided to try to use them again, well, Quatre would use Zero, and all his friends and allies, to force the Jishin to obey them, and ensure he could not betray them or manipulate them. But he'd much rather not. He'd give Duo a day or two to figure things out on his own. Then...they'd see.

"Chang." Quatre glanced over his shoulder at the Dragon. "You and I have a common enemy."

"Which one are we talking about?" Wufei asked in a murderous voice, still staring at Duo.

"Jusan." Quatre rubbed his temples again - and it still didn't magically cure his headache. Useless gesture. "I know you won't let Duo force you to fight, that you can't trust him-"

"Hell, no one here blames you," Fen muttered.

"-but don't throw away your life by attacking him. You can resist Duo's control, you've proven it. Don't try to kill him as well. If you force him into a corner, he'll trigger the Mark to its maximum power and fry your brain."

Wufei stared at Duo for a few long seconds. Then he walked towards him slowly. The Jishin was standing with one hand on his hip, the other hanging loose at his side, his head turned towards the spot where Jusan's image had been. His eyes were wide and unseeing, gazing inward. If he noticed the Dragon approach him, he gave no indication. 

Wufei drew up well within striking distance, a few inches flaunting how little he feared the man who had claws sunk into his mind.

"You Tricksters were renown for your cunning and your double-edged words." Wufei's voice was soft yet scornful. "You claimed you never conquered anyone, but entire races were your playthings, your puppets, your lab rats."

"True." Duo's expression and stance did not change at all as he agreed, eyes still fixed on the spot where Jusan had stood.

"But you never controlled my people, and you are not going to control me. If Jusan wasn't my first priority, I'd-"

Duo snorted and moved so fast even Chang was caught off guard. A black-gloved hand darted towards the Dragon's face and fingers flicked brazenly against his forehead.

Wufei's reaction was immediate and probably entirely instinctive. The punch knocked the mocking Trickster to the dirt several feet away.

Duo sat up slowly, and rubbed his jaw - the blow had landed an inch from where his armor had worked to reduce the swelling from Wufei's previous strike. He looked up at the Dragon who was staring at his own fist and blinking in confusion. Wufei was not racked with pain, and the Mark of control hadn't even twinkled. He looked at Duo in shock as the latter rose slowly to his feet.

"That one... " Duo rubbed his jaw again, "That one I'll give you for free. I wouldn't try it again if I were you."

"What-... why didn't I-"

"Why aren't you rolling around the ground screeching in agony? I removed the Mark, Chang. Do try to keep up."

Wufei's jaw dropped. "What? Why?!"

"Oh, don't sound so disappointed," Duo purred mockingly, fingers tracing the nasty bruise on his jaw. "I can still make you my pet if you want me to."

The Dragon just stared at him, confused. Duo rolled his eyes. "Get a grip, Chang. As you so blatantly pointed out, you'd rather die than submit to the Mark. So what's the point of keeping it? I can't use it to make you fight Juusan, and you might lose your rag and try to kill me at some point, and then you'd be dead, and I have very few uses for a corpse, even a good-looking one."

Wufei's eyes narrowed, then he looked quickly towards Quatre. "Seer! Is what he saying true?"

Quatre blinked, distracted by the event he was half-seeing in the future. "What?"

"Did he remove the Mark?!"

"I honestly couldn't tell you." Quatre used his vision but didn't bother to look very far. "He was able to sink it deep enough in your mind so that even the Scourge couldn't find it. I don't stand a chance if he's just done that again."

Wufei growled and turned back towards Duo. "I guess we'll find out when I rend him limb from limb."

"The only thing we'll be finding out is if there really is rock in that pretty head of yours," Duo countered with a cruel grin, taking a few steps sideways. His armor gleamed, black glass that seemed to obliterate the light from the mottled sky. "I did remove the Mark, Ryu, but that doesn't mean I'm easy game."

"I would be disappointed if you were," Wufei murmured, moving forward. Duo had placed a fallen slab of stone between them, but the Dragon could leap that without even trying. "Do you think that because you freed me - or pretended to - that I will forget what you did to me? Or that I will trust you now?"

"Hell no, the Jishin never bothered worshiping our Gods, so we tend not to believe in miracles," Duo snorted. He leaned his hands against the waist-high slab of stone, an arrogant pose, oblivious to the danger of the approaching Dragon.

"Then I'm curious, Elsire. What possible lie, what little trick can you use, to stop me from killing you?" Wufei drew up on the other side of the stone, within striking range. Shenlong crackled.

"No lies, no tricks. No more," Duo whispered, and Quatre was maybe the only one to catch the faint flicker of relief that crossed the Jishin's face and mind.

A hiss of metal on metal as Duo drew one of his knives in a swift movement. Wufei tensed, ready to dodge-

The dagger screamed as it pierced flesh then stone...pinning Duo's left hand to the rock against which it had been resting. The magical knife slid into the slab of granite half way to the hilt.

Everyone stared, shocked, even Wufei. Quatre was the only one not caught off guard; he breathed a sigh of relief. Zero could predict the most likely eventuality, but nothing was decided until the person at the center of the lines took the actual decision, chose one path rather than another.

Duo gasped, eyes wide and luminous, staring almost in fascination at the knife impaling his hand.

"Chi, ishi, tami, ho-on. Blood, stone, pain and bone. My name is Duo Maxwell, Shi No Kami. As long as the earth keeps my blood, I will never tell a lie. Chi, ishi, tami, ho-on."

In the silence that followed the dripping accent of the old Words of Power, the only sounds were Duo's deep, shaky breaths and a few screeches as the birds around the sanctuary slowly recovered from the shield spell's deafening deployment.

"That oath... " Svale's voice was soft, but in the stunned silence it could not be ignored. "That is inviolable. It is totally binding for a Jishin. From now on, he can only tell us the truth."

The Dragon made a choking sound in his throat. He looked like he wanted to be furious, but he couldn't tear his eyes away; they went from Duo's crucified hand to his eyes, weirdly luminescent and almost at peace as they stayed fixed on the dagger.

Quatre moved forward slowly. Everyone was still stunned, but nevertheless Trowa moved forward behind him, as if they were joined by a thread that would not stretch.

Duo smiled - it was slightly twisted, and his eyes widened even more. He reached for the dagger and jerked it from the stone and his hand. Blood pooled against rough granite, trickled from the black glove. The armor twitched and withdrew suddenly, inching away from the wound, leaving the hand bare, pale, and looking small and vulnerable. Duo stared at it as if fascinated; his face was white and his eyes dilated with pain, but he was still smiling slightly.

"Duo Maxwell." Duo finally glanced away from his hand as Quatre spoke softly. "I think we need each other's help against a common enemy. If we swear to help you kill Jusan... will you help us defend our home?"

Duo's crooked smile melted. His right hand circled his left wrist, applying pressure to staunch the flow of blood. When he looked up again, the small smile that appeared was a bit rueful, but the most honest Quatre had yet seen on him. "Yes, I'll help you. Worrying about Center's well-being will make it harder for me to kick Juusan's ass... but without you guys, my chances are non-existent anyway. Besides, I won't see him destroy another planet if I can help it."

"Good."

"Good?!" Wufei finally snapped out of his stupor. "Are you saying you're going to fight alongside him?"

"Yes." Quatre turned to face the Dragon. "Svale knows about the Jishin. If she says that oath is binding, then it is. I might not have been so quick to trust him if he'd sworn to help us - as you said, the Jishin are known for using words with many meanings. But if he can't lie... ask him what you want that will convince you that you can trust him, Chang. He can only tell you the truth."

"The only thing I want to hear from his throat is a death-rattle," Wufei growled, taking a step to move around the stone. Duo opened his mouth to probably say something about stubborn Dragons, but Quatre beat him to it.

"Really? I thought you said Justice was more important than your personal satisfaction."

Wufei stopped as if he'd hit a wall. The glare he turned on Quatre made Trowa step forward protectively.

"I can understand why you attacked him when you thought he might make you his puppet. Trust me, I know exactly how you felt. But he's not controlling you now, and he can no longer lie to you. What else do you want?" Quatre sounded infinitely reasonable.

"Blood!" Wufei snapped, not sounding reasonable in the least and obviously not concerned about it.

Duo grinned and gestured towards the trickle of red running down the rock to stain the earth. "Help yourself!" he chuckled.

"Chang-" Quatre started, but an abrupt, annoyed gesture from Wufei shushed him.

Wufei stared at Duo for a long minute, and even the Jishin was wise enough to keep quiet. Then the Dragon walked around the slab of stone slowly, menacingly. 

Duo turned to face him fully, resignation on his face. "So... you really want us to duke it out, Dragon? Just say the word-"

"Shut up." Wufei stopped a foot from his former opponent. His eyes were cold and hard.

"I don't like this," he announced, rather unnecessarily. "But the seer is right. Jusan is my first priority. I'll be watching you closely, Jishin. That oath of yours is about to be put to the test, repeatedly. You are not an ally. You are a necessary evil." Duo's grin twisted a bit. "But I will not kill you. Not until we defeat Jusan. Then... "

Wufei stepped nearer, until his shoulder brushed Duo's. "Then, Jishin, your life is mine."

"You're welcome to it," Duo murmured, apparently amused. He watched Chang stomp away out of the corner of his eye, then turned towards Quatre. "Right. Now that that's sorted-"

"Here." Quatre gestured towards Duo's hand with both of his. Duo stared at him, then glanced down at his injury.

"No can do, Q. It's got to heal by itself."

"Does it? Does that affect the quality of your oath?" Quatre asked ironically.

"Well, no, but it's traditional to-"

"You Jishin liked your traditions painful, I see. Screw that, Duo, just give me the hand."

Duo tentatively stretched out the injured limb over the stone into which his blood had soaked, binding him to his word. Quatre took the hand gently in both of his, and, with some relief, let go of Zero, probabilities and careful plans, and concentrated on the cleansing task of stitching together flesh and bone.

"Thanks," Duo mumbled. He was possibly referring to Quatre healing the injury...

Quatre glanced up at him as the skin slowly closed beneath his fingers. "You're welcome," he said softly, not talking about the wound at all.

Duo's eyes flickered over Quatre's shoulder where the healer knew that Trowa was looking at Duo with considerably less acceptance. The violet-blue eyes dropped back towards Quatre's hands as they patted the knitted skin, bearing only a faint bruise and scar.

"There. It'll hurt for a few days, but you can use it and it won't get infected. Now we should all go rest. I'm sure we can spare twenty four hours to crash before we start figuring out what to do next. And I'm sure we all need it." Quatre dropped Duo's hand. "Chang?"

The Dragon had stopped at the spot where Jusan had disappeared, glaring at it as if he could rip his way back up the mystical path of the mental projection and force himself onto Libra. He glanced up in surprise at Quatre's hail.

"What?"

"You don't know us...and you attacked us twice." Quatre smiled slightly. "But we have a common enemy -"

"He's talking about Juusan this time," Duo put in as if lecturing a child. The Dragon gave him one contemptuous sneer.

"I know what you're going to suggest, love," Trowa leaned forward and whispered into Quatre's ears. "Are you sure it's a good idea?"

"We're all fighting Jusan," Quatre countered.

"Yes, but until he shows up, these guys will only be fighting each other. The Jishin and the Dragons were enemies long before those two got off on a very bad footing."

"Well... " Quatre hesitated, slightly bemused. Yes, there was a lot of conflict in the lines binding the last Jishin and the last High Dragon, but some of them nonetheless went off on a strange tangent... very strange... maybe Zero wasn't quite as fixed as it claimed to be. "Don't worry about it. We'll just have to keep the peace between them."

"I was afraid you were going to say that." Trowa sighed, but stepped back.

"Chang, if you want, there is room in this Sanctuary for you. If we want to plan a united line of defense against Jusan-"

"Is the Jishin staying here?" Chang asked nastily.

"Hey, who says you can invite a stupid Dragon into the Sanctuary of my people, Quatre?" Duo drawled, almost at the same time.

"Good luck with that, love," Trowa murmured and walked away, after tossing the stone creature into the air in Duo's general direction. It shot off and fastened onto Duo's shoulder, and then started shaking its tiny fist at the Dragon.

Quatre hesitated, then turned away with a shrug. It didn't really matter where Wufei stayed, at least right away. Sooner or later he'd see the necessity of working together, even with Duo. Quatre followed Trowa, leaving the backbiting behind him. A little puzzled smile curled on the edge of his lips. If Zero was right, there might be some interesting patterns in store for those two. Hmmm. As long as they didn't kill each other before Jusan's arrival, he'd leave well enough alone...

His smile disappeared as he saw Trowa stop in front of Heero. Their friend was still lying where he'd fallen. He looked smaller and much younger than usual, tousled dark hair falling over a pale face, eyes wide open and glazed. Quatre could see every strange line that made up Heero's future, at least for the next few months, and he could see Heero's spirit slowly recovering, and his chest fluttering, but the look on his face and the energy that had ripped from his frame were so frightening, the healer still knelt quickly and felt for a pulse out of instinct. Heero didn't react. His heart beat fluttered against Quatre's fingertips, slow and unsteady.

Trowa crouched on Heero's other side and put a finger on his forehead, over his crown chakra Quatre absently noted.

"He's... " Quatre swallowed. Zero had outlined the necessities of using Heero, and Jusan's appearance and show of power had confirmed that it had been a necessary sacrifice, but he still felt guilty. "He's so drained. I can't even tell how badly he's damaged-"

"He's not."

Quatre glanced up at Trowa quickly. At first he wondered if that had been wishful thinking on his lover's part, but the shaman didn't indulge in that. Quatre looked down at Heero again. "But... his pattern is... there's been major disruptions-"

"Or maybe revelations," Trowa corrected gently. His finger drew a line from the chakra to Heero's nose and tapped it. Heero didn't even blink, it wasn't all that certain he was conscious. "He channeled Center, the spirit of the earth. For maybe the first time in his life, Heero knew what it felt like to be unconditionally accepted... and loved. The thunder rings loudest in utter silence, as my old teacher S would probably say at this point."

Quatre looked from Trowa to Heero and back again. He could only see destruction. On some level, his instincts were telling him Trowa was right, but... how could the shaman, limited to the natural pulse and patterns of the earth, see more in this than Quatre could with Zero? He caught Trowa's gentle smile as the shaman shook Heero, then ruffled the tousled hair affectionately when that failed to raise him. Something twisted inside the healer's chest; Zero informed him it was a slight surge of insecurity and jealousy, and immediately suggested three different programs that could curb such distracting weaknesses. Quatre told Zero to go to hell.

"Well, don't just let him lie there. Let's get Fen to carry him back to his room," he muttered, looking around for the tall man.

"I can carry him. He's not that heavy."

" ...Right." Quatre managed not to ask how Trowa knew that.

Heero blinked once as Trowa hoisted him up. He was still pretty out of it. Quatre frowned. When Heero was back in the game, they'd have to worry about his reaction to Duo. And to the Dragon for that matter. The healer winced at the thought of the three-way fight that might entail if he didn't keep things properly in hand. Zero had finished its first line of repairs and was now working on details. Emotions were pulsing through the healer again - worry the first among them. He was going to have to rely heavily on Zero in the coming months. The spell was the only tool he had that could help them all weather the coming storm.

Trowa took a step out of the circle and glanced around.

"Quatre... do we really stand a chance?"

The healer followed Trowa's gaze. On one side of the cirque, Chang and Duo were facing off - well, the Dragon was facing off, Duo was leaning with insulting casualness against a stone, laughing in his face. They appeared to be arguing about some event that had occurred fifty years ago during the Jishin's Twilight retreat. Nearby, Fen was stumbling, eyes still a bit dazed as he tried to use his own Zero, reduced by the flickering dampening shield over their heads, to sort through his memories of previous lifetimes. It would be hard for him, but Zero informed Quatre coldly that the Phoenix wasn't human, despite his appearance. If Duo gave him back his soul-stone, there would be absolutely no guarantee he would side with them against Jusan. No, no guarantee at all. Svale was by Fen's side, suggesting that a good dose of liquor would help; she was guiding him towards the main building with a hand on his butt. The fact that Fen wasn't reacting to this was proof enough of how confused he was.

"Well, there's always a chance." Quatre tried to smile. "And it's probably better than it looks."

Trowa lifted an eyebrow as he glanced around one last time before hoisting Heero more firmly in his arms and turning away. "That's really not saying much."

\---

Next Chapter: Try Non-Enemy as a Concept

Heero, Duo and Wufei manage not to kill each other. Huzzah.


	31. Try Non-Enemy as a Concept

Trowa's nose twitched. Half-asleep, he brushed his hair away from it.

"The source of all things."

Trowa's normal eye opened a slit. He glanced at Quatre who was curled up by his side. The healer's eyes were screwed shut and he was frowning slightly, the expression half-hidden by his pillow. His hand was gripping Trowa's biceps.

"Probability... benchmark... entropy..." Most of Quatre’s words were inaudible mumbles.

Trowa woke up a bit further and began to scowl. Goddamn it, Zero, we've just repealed Jusan's attack against all odds, cast a magical shield that gives us a chance of beating him when he arrives, we're bruised and tired... can't you let him sleep in peace just this once?

"The universe ’s pile o’ marbles... "

Oh. Trowa's scowl dissolved into a rueful quirk of the eyebrows. Sounded like Quatre was, in actual fact, dreaming.

"We c’d lose some... " Quatre mumbled seriously, frowning even more, the gravity of the expression somewhat lessened by the pillow.

"I doubt we have to worry about that, love," Trowa whispered, pushing a golden lock out of a tightly shut eye. "Go back to sleep."

Quatre huffed into his pillow, then the frown disappeared as he drifted off.

Trowa glanced at the light spilling through the cracks in the crude shutters to splash joyfully on the opposite wall. It looked to be late afternoon. They'd only slept a few hours. Trowa thought he would be happy to sleep until early tomorrow morning if he was allowed to. He was sore despite Quatre's healing, his body and spirit exhausted by the desperate against-the-odds fight that he'd managed to win this morning. Yes, sleep sounded good.

His eyes were closing when he felt someone stir in the room, someone other than Quatre.

Trowa stiffened, and then remembered. He gently disentangled his arm from Quatre's grip and sat up carefully.

"Heero?" he whispered. "How are you doing?"

He'd been reluctant to leave his friend alone in his room, helpless and unconscious. They'd laid him out on a pallet along the wall opposite Trowa's and Quatre's bed.

Heero was awake. He was sitting on the pallet, scrunched into a corner. He had his legs gathered up to his chin, arms tight around his knees. His eyes were open and focused, twitching towards Trowa several times as the shaman moved, but always returning to a spot a few feet before his face, as if he could find an answer to a puzzling problem, hiding behind the air's molecules. Trowa wasn't monstrously surprised when Heero remained silent.

Trowa hesitated. Man, he wanted to sleep. But there was something in Heero's stance, the way he was curled up in that corner... the shaman sighed and pulled himself away from the warm bedcovers without disturbing Quatre.

Heero glanced at him briefly, then returned to his contemplation of nothing much that the shaman could see. Trowa crouched near him and glanced at Heero's lines.

 

Signs of stress, both physical and mental. But considering what Heero had been asked to do, accumulate so much of Center’s life-energy and channel it into a spell, his own life a speck easily lost in the flow... well, it was already a bloody miracle that he wasn't as dead as a rock. Or rather, Trowa corrected himself as he remembered the little stone critter fluttering around Duo, considerably deader than a rock.

Wait... That was interesting.

Heero's lines has always been very crude and focused, probably on this all-important mission that he seemed to be perpetually preparing for. Trowa had long ago consigned the mystery that was Heero Yuy to the bin marked 'force of nature - don't try to explain, just stay out of its way'. Looking at Heero's lines for any length of time gave him a headache.

But now that he was looking closely, checking for damage, he noticed that the patterns of the mind were a bit... fuzzier than before. Less focused? Troubled? Trowa glanced at Heero's eyes - they were once more fixed on the air in front of his nose, ignoring the shaman. He wondered what it had felt like; the confrontation of Heero's iron belief - as subtle and as safe as a buzzsaw - and Center’s great, big muddle of life, death, and everything in between. Looked like Heero had survived, but had not escaped unscathed.

Trowa didn't bother saying anything. He just sat down on the pallet next to Heero and stared at the same space in silent support. He didn't know if Heero valued his friendship or his presence, but if he did, then Trowa would be here until Heero lost that slightly bewildered look in his eyes.

He'd nearly dozed off - the molecules of oxygen Heero was staring at were doing nothing of particular note - when Heero stirred.

"Heero?" Trowa stood up as Heero suddenly surged to his feet. Ah, he was scowling again. Apparently, he'd decided to overlook whatever revelations had shaken him. Well, that's one way of doing it, Trowa thought without criticism. Humanity had evolved denial for a reason. Of course, the jury was still out on whether Heero was in fact human or not. But the shaman didn't mind if the puzzling warrior borrowed a trick or two from the mortals around him, if it helped him to cope while his mind and soul adapted to the truth.

He followed Heero towards the room's door, glancing longingly at Quatre. The healer was still curled up in the same position and just looking at him made Trowa's eyelids droop. But he should really stick with Heero; he had a couple of things to explain to his friend once they were out of the room and could talk without disturbing Quatre. Things like-

Heero opened the door and Chang Wufei stared back at him. Trowa barely registered the fact that the Dragon had his fist raised to hammer on the door before his mind ducked for cover waving a little red flag with 'oh shit' emblazoned on it.

Heero and Chang stared tensely at each other, not moving a muscle. Trowa thought of two great cats suddenly confronted on the edge of each other's territories and wondering if a viable option would be to pretend they hadn't seen each other.

"Heero-" Trowa started. His voice was soft, carefully pitched to sound as calm as possible, but it still broke the tension like one of his crossbow bolts going through a clay pigeon.

Chang jumped back into the large common hall beyond the door, a fluid graceful movement ending in a defensive crouch, and Heero moved forward, two stiff, menacing steps.

Shit, Trowa thought, putting a stilling hand on Heero's shoulder. The only way this could get worse-

The door on one side of the hall banged open.

"Where the hell is everybody-" Duo stopped, widening eyes going from Heero to Wufei. Heero's head had snapped around, and the gaze he was giving Duo was, if anything, even deadlier than the one he'd given Chang.

Three way fight. I should have stayed in bed.

In Trowa's moon-touched eye, lines were crackling like live wires between the three, powerful individuals, tightening like a noose. Damn, there must be a way of cutting the knot between them- this was Quatre's thing. That bloody Zero had to be good for something-

Trowa glanced at the room behind him. Quatre was still curled up in the same position, his nose buried in the pillow.

The shaman hesitated. Then took another look at the lines twanging like a crossbow string all around him. Strangely enough, the very symmetry of the triangle gave it a sort of crazy stability. With a bit of careful management and a lot of diplomacy, maybe the tension could be lessened-

Trowa thought about the careful juggling he'd have to pull, like prodding three wild tigers through a series of very small hoops. And he thought of Quatre, curled up in bed behind him, visibly not being kicked awake by an alarmed Zero.

Screw this.

"Heero."

All three antagonists tensed slightly at Trowa's voice. Three pairs of narrowed eyes glanced his way.

"Chang and Maxwell are going to help us fight Jusan. Deal with it. _Outside_. You guys do what you want, just don't kill each other or make too much noise."

Trowa turned around, closed the bedroom door behind him on a situation his gut instinct was telling him was tense but not, when it came to it, downright lethal, and went back to bed.

\---

 

Duo morosely watched the door close. He'd caught a glimpse of a peacefully slumbering Quatre before Trowa left them to their own devices. There, he concluded, goes a smart man...

He turned back towards Heero, who was glaring at him. Here goes...

Duo hadn't rested. Though he'd felt like it. After fighting Juusan tooth and nail on the mental plane, he felt like curling up with a blanket and a dozen aspirins and sleeping for a week. But there was no rest for the wicked, or for Shinigami either.

He'd spent the time reacquainting himself with his powers, trying to get used to the imposition of the planet-wide magic-dampening shield above his head. He could now teleport again without spreading himself around the ether accidentally. So he stared back at Heero coolly. Big Bad Yuy could put the glare away, Shinigami was not impressed. If he wanted a fight, Duo would port out, and let him cool down on his own.

But if Duo ported away, then that would leave Heero and Wufei face to face... Duo doubted that Trowa's casual 'don't kill each other' order was going to be obeyed by either of these neurotic homicidal brutes. Damn.

He gave Heero something of a less arrogant smirk, trying for conciliating. Cool, let's all be cool.

Heero moved towards him. Slowly and a bit more menacingly than Duo liked. In the background, Wufei crossed his arms over his chest and looked on with obvious interest and an evil smile. Jerk.

"Heero, buddy! So, all recuperated from being a conduit, heh? You're not still mad at me for-"

"Friend."

Duo's mouth continued to move on automatic, but the words had gone to huddle into his throat to reflect on this turn of event.

"Say what?" he finally asked cautiously. He'd stopped believing in miracles over six years ago, if he ever had.

"I can beat Jusan," Heero said softly without the slightest hint of either doubt or pride. He'd stopped five feet from Duo, his face an unreadable mask.

" ...Good for you," Duo finally said, since it was apparently his turn to contribute to the conversation.

"He uses magic. He has an army. He uses tricks. Like you."

Calm, Duo reminded himself. You need Heero. You cannot use him against Juusan if you flay him for comparing you to the Scourge. Duo made some kind of strangled noise in his throat. In the background, Wufei was grinning, apparently enjoying this.

"You fight with Jusan as an equal. Trowa said that I can add a friend's strength to my own."

"I think he meant allies," Duo corrected dryly. He was going to add that the Jishin didn't have friends, not among the lesser races anyway; the closest a Jishin got to the notion of 'friend' was somebody they could use that they hadn't screwed over yet.

He was going to add that, but Heero spoke again softly. "Friend."

There was a subtle nuance to the affirmation. It kinda implied that it was friend or foe.

Duo remembered rather vividly what Heero did to his foes.

"Friend," he confirmed weakly. If Heero had latched on to that concept, Duo wasn't going to try to take it away from him. Strangely enough, the oath of blood and stone did not stop the word from tumbling from his tongue. Even though it wasn't entirely true. Was it?

Heero glared at him some more, then turned the same look on Wufei.

The Dragon's grin became even more arrogant, and there was an ugly light in his eyes.

"Forget it, Yuy," he said before Heero even opened his mouth. "I'll concede that it's in my interest to put up with you. I might even be able to work with the Jishin without killing him. But we're not friends. We're barely allies."

Heero pivoted slowly on his heels, started to stalk towards his former enemy. The glare was an almost solid thing, crashing against Wufei's obvious disdain. Wufei stood his ground, eyes narrowed, radiating the will to fight at the slightest provocation.

Oh, that was diplomatic. Duo recognized the way Heero was moving. Trouble. Chang Wufei, Duo thought, and realized he was writing an obituary in his head: The valor of the Dragon, the arrogance of the tiger, the survival instincts of the lemming...

A few of the Jishin dead inside Duo's mind stirred. His company of departed souls were mostly silent these days, dreaming dreams of blood and revenge. But a few of those killed by Dragons a few decades ago were whispering like the wind through a crypt: 'good riddance'.

No, Duo snarled at them, moving forward to intervene. He may be a damn stupid Dragon, but he's part of my plan. That makes him _my_ damn stupid Dragon. Besides, Heero might injure his sword arm, trying to pound that thick head in.

"Look, Yuy, I know you feel like jumping up and down on Chang - trust me, I know exactly how you feel - but it's an unfortunate fact that we need him to defeat Juusan. His power is mechanical, from his armor, which means it's the one thing on the planet not affected by the dampening shield. And also, he can help you figure out how you use Wing better, and are either of you two even listening to me?!"

Duo stared in growing fury and some concern at the silent confrontation before him. Heero and Wufei were about a foot apart, staring at each other. Duo thought that if he had the time or inclination, he could roast a few links of sausages in the air between them. And having both those idiots ignoring him, Shinigami, was just a bit-

Heero nodded. It was a slow gesture, and his eyes were narrowed. Duo took a menacing step forward, magic sizzling along his fingers, ready to throw up a defensive barrier around Wufei- but Heero simply turned and walked away. Wufei stared at his back for a few seconds, but he did not seem surprised; he smiled slightly and headed towards the door.

"Er... what was that? Did you guys just measure your respective levels of testosterone and decide you're both pretty mean and so you'll let the other live?" Duo stared at the two retreating backs, Heero heading deeper into the sanctuary and Wufei already at the front door. The latter deigned to shoot a contemptuous glance Duo's way, but that was all.

"Grunt once if I'm right, willya?" Duo muttered. He felt oddly put out. He definitely didn't want a fight with either man, not now, and he didn't want them killing each other, but that silent communication made him feel... well, kinda excluded.

He glared at Heero's back as it disappeared into the inner sanctuary. Heero looked... different. There was something a bit more pliant about him now, more ready to understand the world instead of just beating up chunks of it. Duo hadn't seen him in a month; he wondered what had happened. He should investigate. Heero was his main, key player in the plan to defeat Juusan.

But Duo's feet were trailing after the stupid Dragon instead.

...The Heero puzzle needed to be addressed when Duo was refreshed and all his mental agility recovered, and that would take awhile. Might as well tail after Wufei. Make sure he was acclimatizing to the situation alright. Dragons were not renowned for their mental flexibility. He didn't want Fei getting despondent or anything that might affect his fighting abilities. Duo remembered that the young Dragon had been pretty down in the dumps a few months back, when Duo had hauled him back from the jaws of Heero-induced death (but that's okay, there wasn't any need to thank Duo, no, gratitude apparently wasn't in the Dragon dictionary... )

A single hot glare from black eyes and the hostile set of shoulders showed that Wufei knew Duo was following him, but he didn't say anything. He stomped up to the top of one of the sanctuary's mounds and paced around. The sanctuary might have become the heart of the resistance against Juusan, and the originator of one of the biggest spells in the last few centuries, but it still didn't look all that impressive in the light of day; rolling green hills, antique gray stones tumbled and rounded by age and weather. A few low buildings that Svale had shored up to create living quarters for her and her friends. The ruins stretched several acres, of windswept grass and plover's nests, and nothing but the highlands around them.

The little light from Shenlong's small head-piece flickered before Wufei's left eye as he scanned the ruined buildings around him.

"Whole place is shielded...I need a reliable source of information," Wufei snarled, apparently to empty air. At a prudent distance behind him, Duo grinned like a fox.

"Reliable information is in short supply at the moment, Dragon. The shaman did not look like he wanted to be bothered, and you won't wake Quatre up without going through Trowa. Heero...well, is Heero. Fen I saw about an hour ago. The shield has done a lot of damage to whatever control he had. He's sitting in a corner grumbling and glaring at nothing, trying to remember what eon it is. We normally have a few old coots around - a techno-cabalist called Howard, and five crusty old wardens I've not officially met yet - but they all left a few days ago to evacuate civilian populations in case Juusan got through us, and set up some last-ditch defenses. So, that only leaves me, my Imp or-"

"Handsome!"

The Dragon staggered back a step as Svale bounced over a nearby rock like a particularly disheveled goat and tried to grope him. Even Duo blinked. He'd not seen the old hag approach, and he had no clue how long she'd been here.

"I was looking for you! It occurred to me that we've not been formally introduced! My name is Svale! Wanna marry me?!"

Duo managed not to purr at the look on Wufei's face. He crossed his arms patiently and waited.

"You... " Armour clinked and rustled into fists, the dragon fangs at Chang's wrists reared up. Then he had to take another step back to dodge a second grab from Svale. "You disrespectful-"

"Did I hear you say you had some questions, pretty boy? I have all the answers you need!"

Duo watched with interest the internal struggle before him. Wufei's face was twisted and a bit red. He glared at Svale - who'd plonked herself back on the rock in a pose that might have been seductive five hundred and fifty years ago. Then he glowered at Duo, who was grinning like a fiend.

Svale batted her eyelashes, which apparently made up Wufei's mind.

"You! Jishin!"

"Yes?" Duo asked nonchalantly.

"I have some questi-" Wufei stepped aside, but Svale wasn't aiming at him this time.

"Maxie! I didn't see you there!"

Oh really, Duo thought sarcastically as Svale wrapped her arms around his leg.

"Hello, fossil." He smirked down at her, and stopped her hands from wandering any further upwards.

"Maxie! So nice to see you again! You've been a bad boy! Svale should spank you!"

"Another day, perhaps," Duo snickered, relishing the stunned, horrified look from the nearby Dragon.

"I can't believe a Jishin was walking around under my nose this whole time and I didn't realize it." Svale was poking his thigh for attention.

"Well, I learned to blend in." Duo shrugged, trying not to remember the first few painful months of leaving the magical realm of his birth to fight his way through Center’s criminal underbelly, knowing that if he used magic, he might warn Juusan that the Scourge had missed one last Jishin.

"You've gotten really good at it. You've had a few years to do it, I guess." Svale beamed at him with a toothless grin. "It's been what, six years since Iwanohone was destroyed?"

"Yes." Duo kept the pleasant grin on his face by force of habit.

"That means you were quite young when it happened. Barely past puberty. Fourteen, fifteen...? Very young..."

Fuck. The old cow didn't miss a trick, did she... Duo stepped back sharply, shaking her loose, and knelt to glare into the rheumy old eyes. "Svale, mind your own business."

"But Maxie, this is my business!" Svale gave him a smile that had the wisdom of crows in it. Then she leaned forwards, her voice dropping to a whisper - a wash of old-lady smell and liquor bathed Duo's face for a second: "I'm making sure that you and the very pretty Dragon over there have a chat and get used to working together. Don't fight with him, and don't play with his head too badly either. Or I will spank you!"

Duo smiled sourly at her disappearing back as she scampered away. Svale as an ally was almost as scary as having her as an enemy. She'd picked up on the fact that he'd been very young when his race had been slaughtered, and he was sure she had an idea of what the consequences on his mind had been, just like Juusan had. But that didn't mean he had to confirm it. Just because he had sworn by blood and stone to tell the truth didn't mean he wasn't allowed to keep some of his secrets.

"You'll learn to ignore her," he told the Dragon as he straightened up slowly, eyes on Svale's departing figure.

"I'm going to have to ignore a lot of things," Chang stated darkly.

"Probably!" Duo exclaimed cheerfully. "Coming?"

He left a perplexed and spluttering Dragon behind him as he headed towards the sanctuary's main cirque, the stage for all the drama of that morning.

As he was nearing the lip of the cirque, Duo glanced up at the sound of frantically flapping wings, coming from the eastern corner where the sanctuary's older buildings crumbled slowly into ruins.

"Master!" Imp was heading towards him at the highest speed its stone wings and magical powers could carry it, eyes wide. "There's a Dragon chasing you!" The little golem fastened itself to Duo's shoulder at the last word. Duo's armor had returned to its appearance of well-worn old leathers. He no longer had to hide his true nature, he could stomp around in 'mythical glass armor' all he wanted to and scare the locals, but this was the shape his armor had adopted as soon as he'd lost his focus on it. It made him realize how much that appearance had, in fact, become ingrained into his psyche, part of him now. He did twitch the armor mentally to form a deep breast pocket for his passenger, but Imp was too busy glaring suspiciously at the Dragon to notice.

"Relax, Imp, he's not chasing me. He's following me, and very reluctantly I might add. I left you watching Fen. Is he finally making sense?"

"Er, no, master. Most of the time he couldn't see me, and when he could he asked me three times who I was. When he remembered, he threatened me a bit, but then he fell asleep. So I came to find you." Imp settled on Duo's shoulder, eyes still on Wufei coming up the side of the hill.

"Damn... " Fen was being affected by the shield far worse than he'd thought. It compounded the absence of his soul stone. Duo had dragged the Immortal into his schemes on a hunch. He didn't know his capabilities, except that the Phoenix was strong, dangerous, and should be manipulable. Duo had been scrounging around for anything of power that could help him in the desperate fight ahead. But he wasn't sure Fen was going to cut it in his present state. He rubbed his eyes. Great, something else to worry about.

He'd arrived at the top of the cirque, and the steps behind him had stopped. He glanced around, only to find Wufei off to one side and watching him with a strange look on his face as if seeing Duo in a new light. He didn't look particularly happy about it. Duo grinned at him. And felt a rush of pleasure; the gesture hadn't been a lie, a counterfeit smile to go unnoticed, appear harmless. It was the true Shinigami grin that he'd so far only shown to enemies who were about to die. But Wufei had seen Duo's true self, the Jishin didn't have to hide from the man.

Neither did the Dragon look terribly impressed. But that was another matter.

"What questions did you have, Dragon?"

"Is it true you cannot lie?" Wufei asked abruptly.

By Nai No Kami's big bald stones, this guy was dumb. Duo sighed inwardly. "You're actually... _asking_ me... if I can't-"

"Even I have heard of the Jishin oath of blood and stone, I know some of the legends." Wufei was scrutinizing him carefully with unconcealed hostility. "But how does it work? Will you drop dead if you tell a lie? Or can you just not say it? Can you say something that can be misinterpreted, knowing it will probably mislead people? That's also a lie of sorts. Can you withhold the truth?"  
"Er... " Duo tried to look both wise and contemptuous, while his mind whirled. He'd not actually thought of looking into the mechanics of the oath he'd sworn, he'd been too busy.

He poked his inherited knowledge, the mass of facts that he'd received from his dead ancestors. Unfortunately it was like a huge library where all the books had been jumbled up. It wasn't easy to get an answer out of it on the fly like this. No Jishin had taken the oath for ages, it was almost as much a legend to him as it was to the Dragon.

"Can you give me false information unknowingly?" Chang said slowly, as if guessing that Duo himself wasn't entirely sure of his facts.

"Probably," Duo admitted with a sigh. This annoying Dragon was his ally, so he had to be at least half way straight with him. The mechanized ape wasn't half as dumb as most of Dragons, apparently. This was reassuring for the purpose Duo had in mind for him. "The oath binds my mind to not tell a lie, but that doesn't mean it's some all-seeing force that will stop me from saying something I believe to be true if it isn't. Pity, or we could spend all day playing twenty thousand questions and I’d end up the new Oracle of the Ages." ‘Are we really set up to defeat Juusan as we are’ would be first on the list...

"Can you withhold the truth?"

"Yes," Duo answered a bit reluctantly. On his shoulder Imp was quiet. It knew better than to disturb, but its wings were rustling like shaken fans, obviously displeased at having its master quizzed by a lesser being.

"So I'll just have to ask you direct questions that you cannot dodge," Wufei concluded, nodding grimly.

"You sure can," Duo snorted. "But if I don't want to answer your question, I'll just tell you to swivel on it. This isn't placing me under any obligation to allow you to pester me with anything irrelevant, Dragon."

Wufei's eyes blazed with the anger that had been simmering there, helpless, since Juusan had pulled a runner. "You'll answer the questions I ask, Jishin!"

"Yeah. With an exact description of what I assume your parentage to be," Duo agreed pleasantly. Imp made a little worried noise in its throat and slid down the back of Duo's shoulder to put its master between the mean-looking Dragon and itself.

"Whoa! We can't fight!" Duo added as Wufei took a single menacing step forward.

"Why not?!" Wufei growled, taking another step.

"Because, and I am quite serious here, Svale will spank us both if we do."

Wufei looked like he'd walked into a wall for a second. "Why should I let that foul-mouthed harpy lay a- I mean, she wouldn't dare try!"

"Ah. Let's address this issue right away. Svale, you see, despite her appearance, is an avatar of Center. Which means that as long as the planet is here, she is virtually indestructible, she has powers that she does not show but are probably quite impressive, and she is very, very persistent. Why do you think we all put up with her?"

One could almost see the annoyance sparking off the Dragon. After a few seconds, Duo realized he could, in fact, really see very small sparks around the Dragon's headpiece and wrist guards. Apparently Shenlong was picking up on some of its owner's helpless fury.

"Don't piss her off, Chang," Duo sighed. "She'll make your life a living hell. She keeps you on your toes at the best of times...A word of advise from a, well, no, not a friend, but an ally. If you wake up tomorrow morning and feel something small and smelling of liquor curled up against you in the blankets, do not look, just get out of bed and forget it ever happened."

"I am not staying here!" Wufei snarled, spinning around and glaring at the sanctuary. His armor geared up and Duo heard a faint hum as energy gathered to fling the cross Dragon away.

"You should. This is where Juusan will attack," Duo stated simply.

The hum vanished in an instant. A gentle breeze curled around the Sanctuary. It was barren of bird call, all animals still under shock from the spell's casting a few hours ago.

Duo watched the struggle in the lines of Wufei's shoulders, and felt a touch of sympathy. In the past years, Duo had done a lot he'd hated to get to this point in time, to give him a chance at Juusan. And he couldn't even afford the mental energy to regret it. All he could do was hurtle towards his goal, like a bullet aimed at the Scourge's heart, and hope he struck true, whatever lay in his path. Wufei really didn't have to put up with much by contrast, but still, Duo could relate.

" ...You know this for a fact?" Wufei asked quietly.

"Yes," Duo answered seriously. "While the shield is active, Juusan does not have access to his full power. Part of it will be locked into the shield. Did Juusan tell you why he is coming to Centre?"

"Centre is a planet of magic. Jusan has always attacked them."

"And you Dragons merrily helped him," Duo bit out, then regretted it. It went against the grain, but old quarrels had to be buried. He made a half-apologetic gesture in Wufei's direction as the latter turned to glare. "Forget it. No, Juusan is not coming here to blow the crap out of some more magic users. He'd have done it ages ago if that was all. Juusan is coming here because he is a Power. I won't go into the technical explanation. Let's just say, he's a part of the living energy that lies on the other side of Sources, who's managed to rip himself out of it."

"That's possible?" Wufei sounded a bit dubious but at least he was listening.

"Yes, for Juusan. As I said, I won't go into the details. Now, Juusan's been around for a long time. Every so often, he has to go back into his Source, to replenish himself. But with the shield's harmonics interfering with his power, he won't be able to. It'd be like trying to close a door while half of him is still outside. Won't work. Which is good, because if he can resource himself, he'll be even more powerful than he is now and that would be too much to handle, shield or not," Duo added. He didn't want to admit it, but his entire being still ached from Juusan's earlier assault, and that had been through the small, tenuous conduit of Wufei's mind. He wasn't looking forward to the real thing.

"This place is where the shield is being cast from," Wufei said slowly. "So if he obliterates this place-"

"No more shield. So here is where he'll come. I knew you were smart as well as pretty!" That got him a rare glare, but Wufei still looked preoccupied.

"Is there a way of getting more power to the shield?" Wufei asked quietly, glancing up to stare at the oil-spill shimmer in the sky.

"Ah, no. In fact, keeping it at this power level will be something of a struggle." Wufei gave him a sharp glance. "The power Heero fed into it will die eventually. Before Juusan will get here, I'm afraid. The other Wardens I mentioned are looking for a reliable, constant power source. Erm, we're sorta hoping they'll find it."

Wufei was staring at him. His jaw was slightly clenched as he asked: "And when Jusan arrives, what plans do you have for defending this place?"

"Oh, that's easy! I'll cast up a barrier over the sanctuary to resist any funny stuff Juusan will send our way - bit like I did today, when I saved your life, you know." No answer to that remark, just Wufei looking at him with that glowering intensity still. "And then... Heero, you and Fen go and beat up Juusan."

Silence.

"That's it... ?" Wufei said quietly, face darkening.

"Er... yeah?"

"That's the plan? "

Duo nodded hesitantly.

_"I've seen dogs leave better plans in the gutter!"_

Imp squealed and ducked into Duo's pocket.

"I didn't say it was perfect-"

"Perfect?! You're not even sure we'll have a shield for when the most powerful entity in the galaxy attacks us. You'll throw up a barrier that you've demonstrated will not hold more than a minute. Me, Yuy and some gibbering maniac will throw ourselves at Jusan. That’s it?!"

"Er-"

"What about his army?! What about his remaining phalanx of Dragons?! What about his host of mentats?! He's got over two hundred of them! As a whole, they can easily match your power, for all they use their minds rather than magic! You don't have any better plan than that?!"

"Oh, I did," Duo answered mildly, fishing Imp out of his pocket and cupping it in his hands reassuringly. Dragons sure were noisy.

"And?! What plan was that?!"

"The plan where I hurled enough destructive energy at Juusan that it would be even odds it would blow up the planet. Unfortunately, I promised I wouldn't do that."

Wufei deflated abruptly. He looked like he wanted to swear. Duo found himself hoping that one day the Dragon would trust him enough to actually let his feelings show, that is, besides his anger and disgust at having to work with a Jishin. The feeling was odd, and Duo decided to squirrel it away for later contemplation.

The Dragon stared at the magical stone cirque around them, at the place where Heero had knelt and cast the spell, at the spot where Juusan had appeared and tried to take over Wufei's mind.

"Maxwell-" he started.

Duo looked up in surprise. That had sounded strangely subdued. Wufei looked torn once more. He started to turn away, and Duo could almost see the violence it took to wrench him around and face Duo. The Dragon walked up to the Jishin, eyes to the ground. Duo straightened up, slipped Imp safely back inside his armor's breast pocket and got his Ma’daan shields ready, just in case.

Wufei stopped a couple of feet away, and dragged his gaze up from where it had been lingering on Duo's throat, making the latter nervous.

"Maxwell... I have to thank you."

"For which of the times I saved your life did you want to thank me for?" Duo's sarcasm was a reflex to the intense and unexpected words.

"Both of them." Wufei's mouth worked as if he was painfully chewing over each words. But he was holding Duo's gaze unflinchingly. "For the time you healed me after my fight with Heero, and this morning, when you fought off Jusan. I know very well you did it for your own gain. And I know you would sacrifice me with just about as much feeling as you did when you saved me. But... because you did that, I now have a chance to avenge my people and my fam-"

For a breathless instant, Duo caught the hint, in a faltering black gaze turning inward, of a solitude and a loss that echoed eerily in his own empty soul. Then Wufei looked up at him with his old fire, and Duo, relieved, tore himself away from that instant of recognition that had cut at his mind like his spirit armor sliced into his flesh when the memories overtook him.

"Jishin, because I owe you, I will try to come up with a better plan that will give us a chance at actually defeating Jusan, instead of making him laugh himself sick. And you will obey my orders!" The latter was said with a challenging snap.

"I'll listen attentively to your suggestions," Duo corrected with a smile like a razor's edge.

There was a little silence, and Imp dug itself further into Duo's pocket.

"I will listen, Wufei," Duo said softly, without any sign of backing down, "because it's been three thousand years since my people fought a real war, and you Dragons have been at it since your people re-discovered space flight. I don't doubt you're a better commander than I am. But I have been studying Juusan for over six years, and my people studied him before that. There's a lot of power and a lot of hate in here, Fei." Duo tapped his forehead lightly. "You would be a fool to let the animosity between us discard an important source of knowledge and magic."

Wufei's lips curled. "I know my priorities. They are why you are still breathing. As for the information you have about Jusan, I'll... listen attentively to your suggestions, Jishin. Have no fear. But remember. This does not change anything between us. I still remember how you used me like your puppet, sent me to crawl before my enemy. I will not forget."

And he smiled.

It was something akin to the smile he'd given Heero. Its geometry traced the exact pattern of his antagonism... but it was also a sort of recognition. Duo wasn't beneath his contempt any more.

Great, I rank with a Dragon, Duo thought sarcastically. What next? Will the bugs bow to me? Will the worms declare me their king? My people were weaving spells to enchant entire planets while your ancestors were still flinging rocks in the air and wondering why they fell back down again. I am smarter, more subtle and more powerful than you can ever comprehend, you brute, and I used you, not the other way around; I remember what the darkness and despair inside your mind tastes like, bittersweet as nectar, and you know it. So if you want to see how I measure up, feel free to try me anytime.

All that and more were probably etched into the smile Duo discovered on his own lips.

The Dragon snorted ever so softly -still not impressed, heh? Duo wondered idly what it would take, and felt dark magic tingle at his fingertips. Wufei spun on his heels and left, and Duo took the opportunity to admire a firm and rather attractive backside. He was seeing a lot of it, with Wufei's habit of sticking his nose in the air and walking away from him in a huff. Maybe he should mention this when the occasion was right. Like, the next time Wufei got that unbelievably annoying superior air about him and needed to be reminded of-

Imp popped its head out of Duo's pocket, took one look at its Master's dreamy smile that laid his feelings bare, and disappeared back into the protective folds with an 'eep'. Duo fished it out again and stuck it on his shoulder.

"Storm's over, pebble. Don't worry. But... the Dragon and me are gonna have to sort some shit out, sooner or later."

"Aren't you supposed to be allies, master?" Imp asked hesitantly, staring after Chang's distant figure.

"Oh yes. We'll fight Juusan together. What we have to sort out... we'll do it in our spare time. What we have of it. I'm sure it will be very entertaining. We'll just have to remember to have our little arguments outside the Sanctuary. I would hate to learn what Svale is really capable of... "

"You'll also have to be sure not to kill or injure the Dragon, master," Imp reminded him, though it didn't sound too convinced.

"Details, details," Duo muttered, gathering his teleport field around him to port back to his hideout. "Don't bother me with details. I'll only break a few of his bones, and none of those essential."

"Then I'm sure that will be alright, master," Imp said loyally, though the glance it shot at the Dragon's distant form, before the teleport field whisked it and its master away, was a bit worried.

\---

Next chapter: The measure of need

Svale is the avatar of an old, mean planet. Duo is about to find out how mean it can get.


	32. The Measure Of Need

A day had passed. Center’s defenders were rested. Harmony and purpose of intent ruled over the sanctuary.

"You can categorically _shove it up your ass, Svale!_ There's no way in hell I'm even gonna think about it!"

"Now Maxie-"

A shadow fell across Trowa. Someone spoke. Someone who wasn't shouting or whining. It was a nice change, although all they said was: "Hello, Barton."

Trowa looked up. He'd felt G's approach across the courtyard; his Vision was fully restored after his rest. He hadn't thought the Warden would need to speak to him though. 

Trowa's own greeting was abruptly interrupted.

"Shut up, you old bag! I see no reason to subject myself to- if you guys don't have the brains to listen to those who know, that's your fucking problem! Get the wax outta your ears with a fork! I - won't-"

Svale's hectoring interrupted Duo's rant, her voice too low to make out the words through the partially open door.

"Greetings, G. Svale is in the kitchen." Trowa twitched his chin towards the main compound, which held his and Quatre's room, Svale's lair, her study, the big, stone-paved kitchen and communal area, and a few empty guest rooms, simple but serviceable.

"Barton, the whole planet knows where Svale is with all that shouting. I heard it about a mile away. Is it true?"

Trowa's fingers paused on the crossbow bolt he was feathering. " ...What is?"

G leaned forward. "Has-"

"Forget it!! You're over the line, you old hag-"

"Oh, don't be such a damn drama queen, Maxie! It's not like-"

"Has a last descendant of the Jishin reappeared?" G asked, voice a bit louder to be heard over the shouting. "Has he really inherited the collective souls of his people? Is he here? Svale's message was brief."

Trowa gave G a cursory glance. The long nose and fingers were twitching and the eyes were reminiscent of a weasel with the runs. Ah yes, G had always had a fascination for the Jishin that rivalled Svale's. "He's-"

"I _owe_ you?! I owe you fuck all! I'm the one who's given you your best shot! I set all this up: Heero, Wing, Zero, Fen, the dampening shield -"

"Yeah, you did, Maxie, by manipulating the crap out of us!"

"Manip- You weren't complaining when I stopped Juusan from materializing!"

"Yes, he's all that and he's also here," Trowa answered calmly, checking his handiwork. The line of feathers was neat and straight. "You're listening to him right now." 

"...He's... the one shouting at Svale?" G sounded surprised and vaguely disappointed. If he thought a Jishin would be above all that, he was in for a shock, Trowa reflected.

Trowa selected another fletch. The runes he'd carefully enchanted into the bolt hummed warmly beneath his fingers."Svale's been trying to talk him into doing something all morning. I've not really been paying attention to the details." He'd been busy replenishing his stocks of enchanted crossbow bolts in case they were attacked again. Jusan might be a few months away, but he could have more soldiers in orbit, or within easy reach. Reinforcements could also arrive from pretty much anywhere in the galaxy in a matter of weeks, ripping Ether ahead of their liege. The sanctuary was vulnerable.

The door to the compound slammed open just as G took a hesitant step towards it. Duo stomped across the courtyard. He veered on spotting Trowa. The shaman was seated on a blanket, his back leaning comfortably against the old well in the courtyard, his fletching equipment laid out in the sunshine.

"Trowa!"

The shaman didn't glance up from his work; if he ever wanted to finish this bolt, he was going to have to ignore these annoying interruptions. He did lift his chin slightly, indicating he was listening.

"Tro, do you trust me?"

"Only within very well defined limits," Trowa replied truthfully, making sure the glue correctly covered the feather's quill and the sinew holding it in place.

"Yeah, yeah, but, like, you're gonna fight with me, right?"

"Fight with you? Or fight alongside you against Jusan?" Trowa murmured in one of his rare moments of dry humor.

"Are we allies?!" Apparently Duo's own sense of humor had been worn down by a morning of Svale's whining.

"Yes, I guess. Until we defeat Jusan. Duo, meet G. G, meet-"

"And the fact you don't trust me further than you can spit me isn't actually gonna stop you from listening to me when I tell ya how to fight Juusan. Right?! I've got two tons of knowledge about the Scourge, several lifetimes worth. I'm the closest you have to an expert. You'll listen to my advice on how to beat the bastard, right?!"

Trowa paused as he was about to set another feather, and finally looked up at Duo. "Is that what the shouting was about?"

"Yeah. The old goat-" behind Duo, Svale began to mutter and wave her staff around, "-wants me to jump through yet more hoops! She wants me to show you all what Juusan's like, what he can do."

"That sounds like a good idea. Weren't you going to?" Trowa asked mildly.

"I was gonna tell you! But she wants- what she wants is way too much, and I'll be damned it I'm gonna- you guys are just gonna have to be content with what I tell you about the Scourge. I can't lie now, isn't that enough? I already gave you all the oath of blood and stone. What the fuck else do you want, my head on a gold platter carried by thirty virgins singing your praises?!"

"The oath of blood and stone?!" G gasped. "Was that performed here? How exactly does it work?"

"Who the hell are you?" Duo countered, hands on his hips. Then he waved in irritation. "Later, later. Tro! Answer!"

"Will it be enough, as far as I'm concerned, for you to just tell me what you decide is important about the Scourge, in order for me to fight him at my best?" Trowa recapitulated.

"Yes!"

"No."

"N-" Duo stared at him as if Trowa had plunged the half-made bolt straight into the Jishin's chest.

"I know you can't lie, Duo," Trowa continued, his tone not particularly hostile but very definite. "That doesn't mean I trust you implicitly. Look at it from my point of view: you have personally caused me more harm to date than the Scourge has." He didn't need to say more. Duo's eyes flickered gloomily towards Quatre who had followed Svale out of the kitchen. The healer had been present at the argument, though Trowa had not heard his voice; apparently Quatre was letting things run their course, waiting for one of those nexus points Zero favored before acting and manipulating the course of the future. The fact that his lover had been around a very angry Duo had prompted Trowa to settle down in the nearby courtyard to do his work instead of his room. Duo looked like he'd just realized that now.

"I'll listen to what you have to say, and I'll probably follow your suggestions," Trowa continued. "You are an expert, and I know you want to kill him. But that and the oath you swore are not going to let me follow you blindly. I'm pretty damn sure that you're very good at lying by omission. And I don't know enough about the Scourge to be confident that I'm asking you all the questions I should. I'll be fighting him as well as I can, but at the back of my mind, as much as I know I shouldn't let it distract me, I will be wondering what you didn't tell us. I won't be sure there wasn't a better, more peaceful way of handling Jusan. I'll fear that you're still sacrificing all of us needlessly just to satisfy your dead. I'll be wondering if this isn't going to cost me even more this time." He didn't look at Quatre, and he didn't know if the healer looked at him. His lover's lines were nearly unreadable to him since the shield had been cast, Zero adding yet another alien layer to the well-known mind.

He could feel Duo's glare on his head as he bowed it over the bolt's shaft. Then the Jishin spat out a word in an unknown language - not that it needed a translation - and vanished in a small rush of indrawn air.

"Teleportation," G breathed. "A Jishin survivor- the accumulated lore of - simply magnificent."

"His temper could use some improvement," Trowa put in mildly. "He'll be back. He's already stormed off once before this morning. Sorry, Svale."

"No, that's okay, lad," the crone sighed. "You only told him the truth, and what he had to hear."

"I know." Trowa didn't have a clue what Svale was trying to talk Duo into, but he knew it was important because Quatre had been there, listening, ready to steer the conversation into any direction needed. Trowa couldn't guess what the healer wanted, so he followed his intuition and his natural inclination to tell the truth, plainly and simply. Quatre knew this, knew him, and hadn't stopped him from speaking. Apparently he'd judged that Duo needed to hear those simple words too.

Trowa wished the rest of their harmony could be recaptured that easily. He was going to finish these bolts - if people would be kind enough to take their tempers and questions elsewhere - and then he'd see if he could corner Quatre before something else cropped up. They had things they needed to talk about-

"I got news about those power sources we're after," G announced abruptly. "To supply the spell shield with juice. Is anybody actually interested?"

\- and now he had one more important distraction to deal with instead. Talk to him later, then. Always later, Trowa thought, his fingers slowly crushing an inadequate fletching feather. If this keeps up, Jusan will arrive and blow everything to hell before we can talk. Maybe if we're lucky, our atoms will drift into synchronous orbit around the smoking dead planet that used to be Center, and we can finally have it out then.

\--- 

"What are we doing here?" Wufei asked, in a dangerous voice that implied that the answer had better be good.

Trowa glanced at Chang, at the lines of his body and mind. The grumpiness was not entirely feigned, but it was also hiding a healthy amount of curiosity.

In the four days since his arrival, the Dragon had not mingled with the sanctuary's other inhabitants much, and never of his own accord. Trowa had caught sight of him tromping around the hills and mounds, apparently examining everything attentively, Shenlong's analyzer shining its information into his left eye. Svale had kept an eye on him, but she'd been amazingly circumspect, leaving him a few sandwiches where he'd find them and otherwise not trying the slightest bit of her usual molestation. Maybe it was in return for that restraint that the Dragon had agreed to be present today, with only a few growls for appearance's sake.

'Here' did not amount to much so far. After another day of arguments, Svale had apparently won her way. She'd led G, Trowa, Quatre, Heero, Wufei and a very reluctant and hostile Duo down to a room deep within the sanctuary. Trowa had noted Fen's absence, and Svale had explained that the Phoenix was still not up to public appearances. Privately, Trowa thought it more likely that Fen was still not up to being put into a small room with Duo, but he let the explanation go unchallenged.

The room was one Trowa had never been in before, in one of the areas recently revealed by the sanctuary's reactivation. It was a half-sphere hewn from bedrock, about thirty feet in diameter and empty. The walls were so smooth the granite looked like marble. Trowa spotted faint grooves in the polished floor, an elegant, entrancing pattern that danced by the light of Svale's small lantern. There was no place to sit, so the small group stood around. Svale's air of expectation delayed questions, except for Chang's grumbling. Duo, in his own little cloud of bad temper, kicked at a few dust bunnies and debris and went to stand in the center of the room. He appeared to be concentrating.

"Okay," he muttered after a few minutes. The words echoed against the rock that surrounded them. "The spell's starting. It'll take some time to get what it needs. But I'll let it cast the first setting, just to be sure it's working. This thing's antique."

Svale's agreement was cut off by a yelp. Trowa fell to a half-crouch, his fingers instinctively on his knife. He fought off a wave of nausea coming from the conflicting information his senses were bringing him.

The eye that could see beyond the surface of things was telling him he was still in the same stone room beneath the sanctuary.

The eye that could see the mundane world was insisting he was now in a wide, open chamber full of hazy, afternoon sunshine.

With a deep whine of an engine firing up, Shenlong shot up Wufei's arms and torso as its owner stared around wildly.

"Calm down," Svale put in quickly before Chang could blow a hole in the wall ('which wall?!' the shaman's senses screamed, still deeply lost within their schism). "It's an illusion."

"You could have warned us, you old bat!" G gasped, steadying himself absently against Heero's solid frame. Heero showed absolutely no surprise at the abrupt change in the room around him. Trowa briefly wondered what the silent man was seeing.

"Oh, but it's so much more fun this way!" Svale cackled, scooting prudently away from a boiling Dragon to stand behind Heero as well.

Trowa looked around carefully, getting used to the conflicting views he was seeing. He kept in mind the real limits of the room, and examined the illusion. The chamber they appeared to be in was somewhat conical, rising twenty feet above their heads to a rounded point from which faint lights sparkled, suspended in mid air with no visible means of support. Large windows, unglazed and open to the elements, allowed the light to flow in and bring warmth to the cool off-white stone of the walls. There were about two dozen prongs of rock that had apparently ripped themselves up from the floor and fashioned themselves into deep chairs, like strangely helpful stalagmites. A few colored cushions lent them some comfort, and broke the room's otherwise stern monochrome. In some areas the stone floor had apparently cracked, and plants pulled themselves up towards the sunlight, small shrubs and a few ferns, so incongruously out of place that Trowa had to conclude that this was deliberate.

Duo walked around in a tight circle, looking at the illusion critically. His face was set in its usual relaxed lines, but his eyes, as they rested briefly on Svale, were savage. His steps echoed strangely, rasping against granite instead of the softer limestone of the illusion, and when he spoke, the echoes of his voice reminded them all that they were still in the much smaller room, deep underground.

"Doesn't look too bad. The spell's still working." Duo's happiness knew definite bounds. "Right, the room needs some time to get the rest of the information from my mind."

"Your mind?" Chang’s brusque voice sparked new echoes from the invisible walls.

"These are my memories. Not only mine, actually. This is-" Duo gave Svale a sour glance. "This room is built to house a very complicated spell, which connects with a Jishin's mind, and also with those of any Jishin present at the scene through the Tamashii-korro."

"The Tamashii-...?" Trowa thought he'd heard the word before.

"The Soul-mind of the Jishin," G supplied. "The well of knowledge formed by the souls of the dead, accessed by the living."

"This spell won't work with normal humans. But it can plug into a Jishin and get all the memories of an event from him and project it as an illusion," Svale chipped in. "It was used as a study tool, so that traveling Jishin could show their peers what they'd seen on other planets."

"It was also used for investigating crimes," Duo ground out.

"Yes, I guess it would be, since the images here cannot be falsified, and anything missing can be reconstituted from all witnesses that were present, living and deceased," Svale agreed with equanimity. "But mainly it was a study tool, and this is where we are going to study Jusan."

Trowa stared at her. Surely she couldn't be proposing that-

"This will show not only image and sound, but should give us some feel for the context as well," Svale concluded. "You have to agree, Maxie, it's a much better way of showing us what you know of the Scourge, rather than just telling us, right?"

Merciful Center... Trowa closed his eyes briefly, then looking around to see if anybody else had put it together. If they had, they didn't seem particularly disturbed.

Duo smiled before turning away. It was extremely ugly.

"It'll take a few minutes," he announced, his voice incongruously pleasant after that smile. "It'll be mainly my memories. The Tamashii-korro is...damaged, and the direct connection to the Halls of the Dead has been cut off. The spell cannot connect to it properly at this point in time, not like it used to. It will complete the visuals - fill in the bits of the illusion that I might not have seen, and it will give you an immersive picture, but I don't think it'll tell you that much more. But that's okay. My memories will be more than enough. Oh. And-" Duo glanced back at them, eyes skipping from face to face. "Welcome to Iwa No Hone. I hope you enjoy the privilege. The Jishin normally kill trespassers."

For an instant the disturbing smile played on Duo's lips again, as he turned back to stare at the empty room around him.

Trowa turned away from that look on Duo's face, and went towards the illusion of one of the windows.

"Careful," Duo said behind him, still in that all-too-pleasant tone, "if you bump against the walls - the real walls - it'll break the spell."

"I can sense them," Trowa answered quietly. He leaned cautiously over the illusory windowsill without touching it. Incredibly, the view that met his eye appeared to be complete in every detail, and the illusion of depth was breathtaking, sweeping his gaze out to the distant horizon. To think this spell was nothing but a study tool, and occasionally a tribunal; the Jishin had mastered magic in ways that left even a mystic like himself amazed.

The window was, to all appearances, situated high up in an old stone tower, gray rock rising organically from a forest canopy below them. The building had no sculptures or decoration as far as Trowa could see, only moss, lichen and ivy at its base. Small trees perched in its deeper crags. The forest around them was oak, cedar, some birch and a few darker splashes of trees that had mutated too far from the original Terran stock to be recognizable. Trowa breathed deeply, but he could not smell the rich growing scents his living eye told him should be there. There was nothing but the smell of rock and dust from the room that contained this illusion. The spell didn't go into that much detail.

There was a grove of massive trees off towards the place the sun was setting. Truly massive. Trowa tried to judge their height in relation to their distance and realized they could in no way be natural. A Jishin Grove, a font of earth-power. In the distance another object reared up through the green canopy, huge, strange, magnificent in its size and sheer oddity: sets of curved horns of white rock, facing in pairs, hundreds of feet high, flattened near the tip. They looked a lot like the remains of a gigantic ribcage.

"The astral observatory."

Trowa glanced at Chang in surprise. The latter had approached silently, and was looking at the windowsill with some suspicion. Finally the young Dragon leaned over it and poked his head out the large window. Trowa moved over to give him some space, and looked at him inquisitively.

"Observatory?"

"I think that’s what they called it. Don't ask me how it works. Magic." The word was said with some distaste. "The Jishin don't - didn't have a single laser reflector or satellite dish on the entire benighted planet. That was their advanced warning system for anything approaching the planet of bones."

Trowa looked at the 'ribs' rising from the forest canopy, then at a distant mountain range rearing up like monstrous teeth. The planet of bones.

"How do you know this?" he asked curiously

"My people kept information and pictures taken by the delegation we sent to the planet fifty years ago." Chang's voice was very exact, with a slight aggressive tone to it that appeared to be natural. It sounded hard and uncaring. Trowa tried to find some traces of the passion he'd seen there two days ago. It was there, a banked fire ready to rise up like an inferno from the embers.

"They visited the planet during the Twilight Retreat, some of the few non-Jishin to have ever walked this world. At that time, my forebears were negotiating a treaty with the Lords of Iwanohone to let the remaining Jishin return to their planet without harassment, if they swore to never return to the outer worlds they'd toyed with for so long." The way Wufei spoke, the Jishin had been suing for mercy. Trowa's eyes flickered towards Duo behind them. It was a no-brainer that the Jishin would have quite a different interpretation to the event. Fortunately Duo hadn't heard the Dragon's comment or had decided to ignore it.

"My people dug up that surveillance information almost a decade ago. We were looking into alternative strategies to attack this place," Chang stated as if this was perfectly natural. His eyes were never still, scanning the building, the forest, the observatory, the room around them, noting landmarks and strategic points.

"You were involved in this? You must have been very young," Trowa murmured.

"I am a Dragon." That apparently explained everything. Trowa knew little about the race of mechanists, but he seemed to recall they'd lifted warfare to a fine art and thrived on it. Apparently their education started very early.

"But finally Jusan decided to deal with the Jishin using a more direct approach, one that did not involve my people." Chang had the minor decency to lower his voice and glance at Duo behind them. The Jishin was still deep in thought, some distance away. "Jusan sent his war-leader, his herald at the time. I understand the man went to Iwanohone and summoned the Scourge. His power was enough to neutralize the planet, though the herald didn't survive the summons."

The last was a mutter, as Chang visibly reconsidered what he'd been told of the incident in light of what he himself had survived a couple of days ago.

"Is he going to show us something?" he grumbled brusquely, glancing at Duo as if looking for a distraction. "Or are we just here to admire the scenery?"

He didn't raise his voice though. None of them did, even when the silence stretched for nearly ten minutes.

Trowa knew why they were all silent. He knew what Svale had, somehow, talked Duo into. All of those present knew what she had asked the Jishin to show them. And even with all the anger and injury lying between him and Duo, Trowa rather agreed with him on this point. Trowa would have told her to shove it up her ass as well.

Yes, they needed to know about Jusan. Yes, it would be hard to rely solely on what Duo chose to tell them when they still didn't trust him. But there had been only one instance where Duo and Jusan's paths had crossed before.

Trowa wanted to know about Jusan, but to make a man relive the genocide of his people was going way beyond the pale.

And none of the others...Trowa looked around once more. His eyes lingered particularly on Quatre...None of the others appeared in any way opposed to this. Somehow, for Trowa, that only made it worse.

Duo didn't look up as Trowa drew near him. The shaman glanced around the illusory room. Nothing had changed there. Motes of dust were pinned solid in the light from the sun, which was stuck, unmoving, against the sky outside. The plants did not nod in the breeze that might be coming from the window. Nobody occupied the chairs which were the room's only furniture.

Trowa examined the chairs briefly. Now that he knew where he was, their appearance no longer surprised him; he remembered Duo bringing forth slabs of rock to imprison Wufei with a touch of his hands. Stones and giant groves and titanic bones. The chairs looked like they were set up for some kind of meeting; they were in a rough circle, though there was a lack of rigorous symmetry to the arrangement that pleased Trowa. It was like the wild, thick forests outside, the mountains at the horizon. Though this was only a memory, he could almost feel the untamed life around them. The Jishin had not believed in conquering their own planet; they'd let it run wild, and ran with it.

"Your home world was beautiful," Trowa murmured.

Duo glanced up in surprise. His eyes were hot and angry, but something in them flinched at Trowa's words and he looked away.

"Was tough." His voice was short and clipped. "Iwa No Hone was no place for the faint of heart. That pretty forest outside was a testing ground. Even Center doesn't have the same proportion of monsters and dangerous spells per square mile."

"And most of them created by the Tricksters themselves," Chang muttered in the background.

"Iwa... no... Hone... " Trowa said slowly. Duo had spun around, teeth bared and ready to flay the Dragon, but that caught him short. "Iwa No Hone? Is that how you pronounce it?"

"Yes. Iwa No Hone."

It sounded more fluent and melodic coming from Duo. Trowa looked curiously at the young man clad in scruffy leathers, with an easy tongue and a raw vocabulary that could put Svale to shame. But when Duo spoke the name of his birthplace, he sounded like a mythical Elsire.

"What does it mean?"

For a moment, he thought Duo wouldn't answer. Then the young man turned away.

"The bones of the stone." Duo's voice was rough. Trowa looked out the window again. Bones of the stone. Yes, the planet had been alive to the Jishin. Trowa was close to Center’s life force too, her dream lines, the minds of men and animals. But the Jishin had been closer to the planet herself, her earth, her rocks, and the simple, primordial growing things that lived off of them. When Duo said 'the bones of the stone', he could be saying 'the arms of my mother'.

"It's ready," Duo announced abruptly. Around them, the light suddenly seemed more vibrant, and Trowa heard faint echoes of footsteps and voices, growing nearer.

The Jishin glanced around as if looking for a landmark. He headed off towards one side of the room, passing near Trowa and a serious Quatre, who'd come to stand near the shaman. Trowa let Duo go by in silence. Because there was really nothing he could say. Duo had agreed to this, he'd chosen to do this so that they could have the knowledge they'd need. Trowa would not insult him with an apology for it, even if that were the shaman's style. There was really no way to apologize for what they'd asked him to do.

Duo was going to show them just what he knew about Jusan, first hand. He was going to show them the destruction of the Jishin.

 

\---

 

Next Chapter: Memories Of The Dead

As much of a downer as you can assume.


	33. Memories of the Dead

There was a sense of growing power in that room of illusions, matching the tension among the spectators. In the heavy atmosphere, Duo's grumble sounded loud.

"For information, we're in the council hall. You'll be seeing the Lords of the Jishin discuss Juusan. Then we'll see-"

"Wait a sec. These are your memories for the most part, right?" Svale stared at Duo. "Why the hell did they have you present at such an important meeting?"

"They didn't. I was eavesdropping." Duo jerked a thumb over his shoulder towards the window behind him.

With a start, Trowa realized there was someone there - rather, the illusion of someone. He couldn't see much; the shadow of a crag cloaked a small figure, two blue eyes peeking over the windowsill. He turned to mention it, and saw that the room behind him was now occupied. People were starting to appear one by one, frozen in the motion of heading to the scattered seats.

One of them was only a few feet away from the shaman, who examined the Jishin curiously. The illusions didn't translate many of their lines for the shaman to read, but Trowa was used to judging people by their stance and their eyes, as well as their aura. These men were quite different in appearance to what Trowa had come to think of as 'normal Duo', and more closely resembled the creature that had faced off with Jusan a couple of days ago: Shi no Kami. There was an air of power about them, wisdom, age... and a certain amount of unthinking cruelty, like the gleam of a cat's eye on a mouse. They looked quite young in appearance, to be charged with the welfare of their people. But Trowa had the intuition that their appearance was a lie. Jishin must age very gracefully. These men and women were old. And not just in age; the cumulative experience of their very long-lived race was in their eyes. The feel coming from the room was one of weighty knowledge tinged with weariness.

Most were about Trowa's height and slender; they wore their hair long, flowing or gathered in loose bunches, or held back by crowns of what looked like shaped bone. Almost all of them were armed with staffs, bows, swords or spears, weapons crafted with so many runes and magic that they caused the air to twang a bit around them. The Jishin all wore spirit armor; smooth, slightly translucent, in blue, white, green, or red. It glowed with their life, their spirit. The designs were simple yet striking: edgings and incrustations of what looked like stylized leaves and vines, or elegant interweaving patterns. Trowa remembered fairy tales, about the Elsire and their glass armor, and their dancing lights. But these men were real. They radiated power, but they also looked worried.

"Okay, spell's starting...now," Duo murmured. And the figures started to move. Trowa backed out of the path of a man who had been dead for over six years as the illusion headed for one of the chairs. This felt morbid enough without having one of these phantasms walk straight through him.

"Lords." One man with golden hair and a brilliant white and silver armor had stayed standing. "You know the reason for our council."

We're hearing this through Duo's own interpretation, Trowa realized. He could see and hear the illusion, but there was more, a faint echo of feelings and thoughts. Trowa could hear the men talking in a language he did not know, but the words were nonetheless understandable, translated by the knowledge of the one whose memories they were sharing. The shaman could even taste a few of the boy Duo's feelings as he spied upon the Lords of his people; something like: 'Get to the point, you boring old farts!' Trowa glanced back at the small presence at the window, now carefully hidden from view. He could feel its trace in his mind. It was young, cheeky, and overbearingly curious. It almost made Trowa smile, but the taste on his tongue was bitter; so apparently, they were not only going to see Duo's memories, but relive them to a limited extent. Sure, why not, Trowa thought acidly, what's one more violation of this man's private tragedy.

"Can we believe Juusan's peace overtures?" the standing man asked gravely. From the faint echoes of Duo's memories that colored the picture, Trowa was aware that this man was the Eldest; not a name that actually reflected his age, more an honorary title. He was the leader chosen by the other Lords, who spoke for all their people.

"He has many reasons to want to get rid of us. And no other reason I can see to approach us," the man nearest Trowa said. He was wearing dusky red armor matched by his weapon, a black and red spear like magma coalesced into burning murder. His finger tapped the shaft in a fitful tempo. 

"Not necessarily," someone countered. "Remember, he's been traveling towards Center for years now. He needs to re-source himself, if what we researched about him is true. We have defenses on Center; our presence there was very strong once. Maybe he's just coming to negotiate safe passage."

"Yes, the only way he knows how," the man in red armor grumbled, but he didn't say it very loudly. Trowa was surprised that Duo had been close enough to catch his words. Then he remembered that the spell also gathered information about the meeting from the memories of the dead, to complement Duo's recollections. That made it, if possible, even creepier. Fortunately Trowa wasn't the type to get distracted by the eeriness of witnessing the reminiscences of a bunch of dead people. He listened attentively.

"We don't know for sure that's what Juusan is planning to do," the Eldest asserted with quiet authority. "Our research is mostly theory and speculation."

"Speculation?" someone objected. "It's pretty convincing. We've been mapping out the extent of his power for centuries now. If he's not the thirteenth aspect of the Source of All Things, then what is he? I would-"

Quatre suddenly gasped and dropped to his knees, eyes dazed.

Trowa was by his side in a second. "Quatre?! Duo! Stop this! What-"

"No!" Quatre hissed, shoving him away brutally. Trowa staggered back.

"Do not interfere," Quatre added in a voice so completely neutral it was obvious he was barely aware Trowa was there. "Duo, continue."

"I don't have the choice, this ain't no bloody vid recording," Duo grumbled in the background. The Lords were still talking, but it took Trowa a moment to tear his eyes and attention away from his lover's profile. Quatre's jaw was clenched in concentration, beads of sweat on his forehead, he was still on his knees, but Trowa didn't think he'd even noticed.

For a moment, he thought his anxiety and hurt over Quatre's actions were interfering with his hearing. Then he realized that everybody else - except for his lover and Heero, who was staring at nothing much - were looking just as puzzled. There was a lively argument going on between several of the Lords, but Trowa could only catch a few words, the rest was incomprehensible.

"Oy! Maxie! What happened to the picture? The words aren't translating."

"That's because I didn't and still don't understand what they were talking about either," Duo growled. His eyes were narrowed as he stood off to one side, near the window where he'd been eavesdropping over five years ago. He was glaring at the Lords. "It's complicated arcane stuff. It's not really important anyway. 'Juusan is fucking powerful', is what they could have said in about one second instead of nattering on about it. This research they mention, about his origins... even with the inherited knowledge of my race, it'd take years of studying to fully understand what they were talking about. It's not important. The important stuff is coming up. The bit where they decide to see if they can't find 'a better, more peaceful' way of dealing with the Scourge."

Trowa could almost feel the last words being drilled into his back. He'd said something like that to Duo yesterday, he recalled.

"Oh. Okay." Svale scratched her chin, producing a gritty noise. "Can't you fast forward it to that bit?"

" _No_ , I bloody well cannot fast forward-"

"Lords!"

Everybody's attention, the living and the dead, focused on the leader. He'd taken a step forward.

"We can discuss who or what the thirteenth is at a later date. We've received word he wants to send us an emissary to discuss peace. After leaving us well enough alone for millennia, now he wants to discuss peace."

The air of worry and complete suspicion were back.

"The man he'll send will probably be his war leader, his herald. We all know what that means." The leader's words rang in the sombre silence. "The question is... do we let him approach us - with due caution? To see what the Scourge wants? Or do we opt for immediate and utter resistance? Knowing what that might entail."

"War with the Scourge."

"Yes."

"But to let the herald onto Iwa No Hone-"

"With due caution."

"With whatever caution. That's... "

"Risky. But look at the alternative," someone pointed out. "If we refuse, Juusan might see it as a signal that we intend to interfere with his plans. That is not advisable. Note that he is sending his herald openly, in apparent good faith. He must know we'll be careful and will not let him near enough to harm us. Maybe he is here to discuss peace. To make sure we don't disrupt his trip to Center."

"We have no such plans anyway, let him do what he wants," a man muttered. He was one of the rare ones to show any signs of age, his dark hair spattered with white, the skin around his eyes as delicate as brittle old ivory.

"If he re-sources, he'll be even stronger. He'll be as strong as he was during the Great Cull. That would be-"

"Still not enough to attack us head-on," another cut in. "Not in person. In addition, since he cannot travel much faster than the speed of light, it would take him hundred of years to get here from Center. We'd have centuries to prepare for his arrival."

"It would be a considerable risk to himself," a tall woman in green agreed. "Juusan knows our power. He's let us live for eons. He knows we are content to stay on Iwa No Hone and spend our Twilight with our research and our magic"

Trowa felt a surge of annoyance from the observer whose thoughts he was sharing: the restlessness of a very young man who did not feel like whiling his life away with research.

"Why should he risk a war with us, in those conditions?" someone else pointed out reasonably. "Maybe that's all this herald has to say. He can speak with Juusan's voice, after all. It makes sense to send his herald and war leader for such an important meeting."

"Anything less would have been an insult," a tall Lord agreed haughtily.

"I, for one, would have preferred to be insulted," the man in red armor near Trowa muttered. The shaman didn't know if anybody else heard.

The leader of the council looked at the assembled Lords as they talked. Through the echoes of thoughts and knowledge from Duo, Trowa realized that only part of the council was audible. The Jishin were a mythical race, and their bonds went deeper than the roots of trees, both the living and their dead intertwined. Their habits were solitary, but their minds were one, on a level other humans could not understand. The leader observed each speaker in turn... and Trowa could have sworn that for an instant the eyes, gray and hard as stone, flicked briefly towards the window, as if gathering the opinion of someone who shouldn't have been there at all. Trowa thought the Eldest smiled ever so slightly. Young Duo was listening to the councilors talking about how much safer it would be to not provoke the Scourge and how they should negotiate peace instead. His solid conclusion rang in Trowa's mind: 'No way! Let's kick Juusan's ass!'

"Very well," the leader said softly, though no one had made any definitive argument either for or against. At least, not out loud. "We agree that immediate resistance, leading to a very likely war with the Scourge, is not the best option. Let's see if we can find ways of neutralizing the herald so that we can let him approach us safely. We need to be able to block his summoning of Juusan without stopping the link between them; the Immortal Power will want to talk to us directly. Let us reflect on-"

The voice had been slowly fading until it was almost inaudible, and the Lord had frozen in mid-motion partway through his speech. Trowa glanced out the window, but the presence there had vanished. Duo had felt completely fed up with their lack of backbone and had left in a huff, leaving the spell bereft of his memories.

The present-day Duo was silent, staring at the Lords who had, in all innocence, condemned their people to death. Trowa could not make out the lines of his thoughts. He didn't feel like digging too deeply.

The council room vanished abruptly. They found themselves in a long empty corridor, staggering at the sudden change.

"Warn people next time," G muttered, looking dizzy.

Duo said nothing. Was he wondering if he could have done something, said something that could have changed the Lords' minds? Changed the course of fate?

A scrabble off to one side brought Trowa's attention towards a window. They were somewhere else in the same building. A young version of Duo was scaling the rough-hewn outer wall, heading towards the window, apparently oblivious of the hundred-foot drop below the ledge that was narrower than his small sandaled feet.

The child - fourteen or fifteen, Trowa guessed - reached the windowsill and scrambled over it. The shaman looked at the younger version with interest. Duo was dressed in pants, shirt and an open robe caught by a belt at the waist, all in a blue cloth the color of the gathering dusk outside. His hair reached his lower back, flowing loose. His eyes...were the clear, innocent eyes of a child on the cusp of adulthood. They contained none of the darkness found within their older counterparts. Understandably enough. His face was as expressive as the Duo that Trowa knew, but this wasn't a mask to hide what crawled beneath it, blood-soaked and torn. Trowa almost smiled as he watched feelings flit across the mobile features. The impish, sinful joy of having done something completely forbidden without getting caught, and the disgust at what he'd heard.

Duo - the adult - stirred. "So, you saw how easy it is to take the path of least resistance, to crawl on your belly and hope the Scourge overlooks you. Now let's skip forward a few months to see what the consequences were, shall we? I hope you guys didn't eat breakfast this morning-"

"Duo!"

Everybody started - the real people present and the young, illusory Duo as well.

The flesh and blood Duo froze, mouth still open, his face suddenly white.

"Do I even want to know?" the man drawled, crossing his arms over his chest as he approached the boy.

He was a few inches shorter than Trowa. Fine hair the color of cinnamon fell to the middle of his back. He wore Jishin armour under a loose open robe; it was much simpler than the Lords', blue with violet reflections. His features and eyes were similar to Duo's. Trowa judged him to be in his mid-twenties, although with the Jishin it was probably hard to tell.

"Oh, Solo, there you are! I was just wandering around looking for you!" Young Duo's face was a picture. Too bad he wasn't this pathetic a liar when we first met him, Trowa thought dryly.

"Really? Didn't think of looking where I said I would be, by any chance?" the man, Solo, asked archly.

"Ah, I went to the lab but you weren't there so I thought maybe you went with Lord Oderon to the council and that you might be waiting for him so you would be here and-"

"Yeah, yeah," Solo interrupted the breathless explanation. His eyes had drifted towards the window. It was obvious he knew exactly what Duo had been up to. "Duo...oh, let's just go finish your project. The sooner you're a man, the sooner you'll stop dragging me into your trouble." He reached over and cuffed the boy as Duo slipped by him. It was a very, very light blow, it barely ruffled the unruly bangs of his charge, who nonetheless went 'Ow!' in the very loud voice of the innocently injured.

"Why'd you do that?! I didn't do anything!"

"Yeah, yeah." Trowa had the impression Solo repeated those weary, loving words a lot. Echoes of Duo's memories informed him that this Solo had been Duo's only kin and guardian. Trowa felt a stab of sympathy for the man. That must have been one hell of a lot of work.

"So, do you think I'll finish it soon?" Duo broke into a run, passing Trowa. He'd obviously forgotten the cuff, the silent censure and what he'd heard in the council.

"No. It'll take months of feeding it magic before the stone comes alive. Assuming you can do it anyway."

"I'll do it!" was the insulted response.

"I'll mention this again, just for the record, boy; no-one's created a golem in three generations. Even such a small one may be beyond you."

"Yeah, yeah," Duo muttered in perfect imitation of his mentor. They were at the end of the corridor, but their voices did not grow fainter. These were Duo's memories. Remembering this, Trowa glanced at Duo behind him. He was looking after the departing figure of Solo, his face a mask but his eyes raw with such longing and pain that Trowa had to look away again.

The room suddenly went blank - utterly blank. People gasped again, and G made gulping noises. They were apparently hanging in a gray void; there was no floor beneath their feet.

There was silence for a few moments. An indefinite light barely illuminated the people present. In that light, Trowa saw Svale scuttle over to Duo, walking over the floor that no one could see.

"Pull it together, Maxie. Show us the rest." Her voice was loud and bracing, without the insult of pity. Duo stirred and nodded slowly. The mask stayed put.

"Right. This is a few months later," he said abruptly, his eyes still as blind as the nothingness around them.

The picture took a few seconds to coalesce. Then Duo shook himself, and suddenly, with the same sense of disorientation, they were back on Iwa No Hone.

They were in a large open space, a rocky outcropping like a mesa rearing up out of a jungle below. Birds whistled and things in the woods shrieked. This was another latitude entirely, Trowa guessed. The illusion was still just as striking; he could almost feel the humid heat that would belong to the scene.

There were several hundred Jishin in a loose circle all around the mesa's top. Svale, passionate about her research on the mythical Elsire, had told Trowa many a tale about them. They were not a social people. Most of them isolated themselves in their towers, intent on research, or weaving strange spells, or dreaming the memories of past lives. The only times they broke that isolation were for councils, research groups, or to mentor the young, as Solo had been doing with Duo. Or to gather in times of crisis, like this.

Trowa picked Duo out of the crowd easily. These being his memories, the spectators to the illusion were near him. He was standing with Solo, some distance apart from the crowd of other Jishin. Once more, Trowa felt a backwash of Duo's memories and thoughts, coloring the scene before him as the boy looked at the people around him. Duo was used to this isolation from others; apparently he and Solo were cousins, the only surviving members of an old House that had been one of the last to retreat during the Twilight. They had few allies in the other, stronger Houses of the Elsire, no kin and few friends. And they were quite happy that way.

"I don't see why we all have to toady to this guy," young Duo muttered. From the way Solo rolled his eyes, this wasn't the first time his young charge had said something like that.

"Don't get into trouble," Solo whispered, though they were quite some distance from the nearest Jishin.

"I won't. I just don't see why we can't fight him. He's not all that. He's been around for millennia. He's got to be so old he forgets how to piss."

Solo rolled his eyes again, and then glanced at Duo sharply. "Keep an eye on that thing."

"I will," Duo grumbled, stuffing something back into the inner pocket of his robe. Trowa had recognized the little stone creature that the real Duo had left upstairs today, his 'Imp'.

"Has it learned to speak, yet?" Solo asked. His eyes were worried, fixed on the empty center of the mesa. Trowa thought he was trying to distract his young charge from the upcoming meeting, or maybe himself.

"A little," Duo answered, though he didn't sound convincing. "He's gotta speak? I mean, real sentences?"

"Yes. Otherwise he's just an animate. A golem must talk."

"Maybe this one's kinda slow," Duo mused, his eyes shifting towards Solo as if seeing what chance that reasoning had of convincing his mentor.

"This was your choice of a coming-of-age project, Duo. This is supposed to teach you - slowly and incrementally - how to connect to our Soul-mind for information and magic without being overwhelmed by it. Right now, you are only in contact with the departed souls of your nearest kin, a tiny portion of the total knowledge that-"

"I don't think any of them ever built a golem. They ain't helping."

"Respect our dead, Duo," Solo retorted, another phrase he was apparently used to repeating a lot. "The Halls of the Dead holds every particle of knowledge of our race, and your kin have access to it. They will help you, but you have to open your mind to them, to the way of our departed souls, to integrate the knowledge they are trying to give you."

"It's all fuzzy."

"That's because you're young. You're still too fixed in the material world to let your consciousness blend with the Soul-mind. You're still trying to hear them as individuals, not as a collective."

Duo glowered at his feet. In his pocket the creature stirred and poked its head out, and he absently pushed it back in again.

"I told you from the start that this project would be difficult. It might take you a long time, though I guess it is good practice, and an impressive achievement to date. Remember though, you have to finish it properly to gain the right to live as a full-fledged Jishin, to access the entirety of the Halls, earn your own tower and start your own studies," Solo lectured sternly.

"In a hurry to get rid of me?" Duo muttered. Trowa had the sudden feeling that the curious, vivacious child - born to a senescent race with very few children as it were - had been something of a burden to many of the older, wearier Jishin who longed for quiet in which to study.

Solo was still for a few seconds. Then without looking he reached over and cuffed his student. Very lightly. Duo's 'Ow!' rang out over the assembly. It sounded more pleased than aggrieved.

There was a shifting murmur among the Jishin. Something shimmered at the center of the mesa. A Seer spell, Duo's memories informed Trowa; it was built into the rocks of the mesa, like a lot of Jishin magic, fueled by the planet herself.

In the vision, figures appeared. A few of the Lords from the council, the Jishin leader, and another man dressed like a techno-cabalist. They seemed to be in some fantastic landscape, barren rock - or ice, rather - glinting under magical lights barely breaking a darkness that looked eternal. Though, incongruously, beneath the Lords’ feet a carpet of grass and flowers had sprouted. They stood in that desolate killing scenery as if they stood on their own lawn, in armor and robes, though Trowa’s instincts were telling him that spacesuits, like the cabalist was wearing, should really be involved. 

The fifteen-year old Duo's appearance flickered. The dusk-blue robes he was wearing twisted and hardened. Incomplete plates of blue glass appeared along his upper arms, his torso. The boy was still too young to fully materialize his spirit into armor, the signature spell of his race. Trowa could feel the intense worry and anger echoing from the young mind. 'What a risk! And for what?! We should never let him anywhere near the planet! We should have blown up his stupid herald before he got halfway to Iwa No Hone! If the Scourge wants a fight, we can take him! We're the Jishin! We're almost as old as he is!'

Solo put his hand on Duo's shoulder. 

Another Jishin nearby, a striking woman in red and gold armor - Havela Pe’sarno, a faint echo murmured, a family friend and occasional visitor at Solo’s tower - turned as if Duo had said something aloud. "Shhhh, boy. Don't worry. The meeting is being held far from here, on the furthest planet of our solar system, beyond the Bone Shields and the Nightmare Barriers. Even the Scourge cannot strike us at that distance or make his way through that resistance. The Eldest has put his Mark of control on the herald as well. The man's will is our captive. The Scourge can communicate through him, and through the Seer spell, but the man does not have the will to summon his master. We are safe."

The words had barely left the older Jishin's mouth -

Jusan.

It was an image, head and shoulders only, floating above the Lords, huge enough for all the assembled Jishin to see him clearly through the Seer spell which had expanded to show the scene fully. He was-

\- Trowa's heart seized in his chest in primal fear. There was no pity in those eyes. No hate, either. Just... inevitability.

The Scourge's presence swamped young Duo's senses, even through the filter of the spell. Trowa felt the passing of eons. Time as an almost physical presence. Jusan stood alone in a galaxy of stars he tended like a garden. The humans races that thrived there had less import than insects; some useful, others vermin according to a logic only he could see. He'd judged the Jishin to be in the latter category. Their extermination held no more meaning to him than the cutting of an infested rose that would spare the rest of his garden.

So he did.

Trowa barely registered the herald's scream of agony, the cries of the Jishin around him as they realized their danger. All those present could feel the struggle of the Lords, trying to keep Jusan from coming through his herald's now emptied mind and soul.

They could all feel the Lords losing.

The image in the sky spoke. It wasn't speaking to them. It was speaking to itself. In all his countless immortal years, Jusan had only ever had one person to truly talk to. He was the only one who existed on his plane of existence, in his realm of time. Entire human races were mere shadows, here and then gone.

"It is done."

Something was happening at the center of the circle of Lords. There was... some sort of light. But it wasn't. It was rather a darkness that seemed to behave like a light, outlining the Lords in shadow, casting strange reflections around the icy landscape. The light squirmed in Trowa's senses, and his stomach clenched and heaved.

The Lords twisted away from it in agony. One fell to the ground, his armor tainted with the sickening non-color. Another, then another-

"No!" Solo grabbed a stunned Duo protectively and vanished.

The scene shifted violently. Trowa was on his knees, feeling even more nauseous. Teleported. Solo had teleported Duo. Where-

The fear and horror were choking him. He could barely breathe. He tried to disassociate the feelings that were his own and those coming from a panicked young Duo. His friends were also on their knees, fighting the same emotions. Except for 'their' Duo, standing with eyes wide and blind. And Heero.

Heero was looking away, towards a distant light on the illusory horizon, with a naked intent on his face that Trowa had never seen there before. Trowa followed that sniper-scope of a gaze. Over a green carpet of jungle he could distinguish a very small image. Jusan's projection through the Seer spell, he guessed. Heero was looking at it. He appeared to feel none of Duo's fear. His eyes were coldly painting a bullseye on that distant figure. He looked ready for a fight. Trowa, still flattened by the sheer enormity of his perception of Jusan, felt only a sick dread at the thought.

"Where-" the young Duo was clinging to Solo, looking around wildly. Trowa followed his glance. They were in a construct of standing stones, similar to Svale's sanctuary. The stones here were not pitted with age, though; they were white and smooth as bone, curved like fangs or standing tall. Solo had teleported himself and his charge at the center of a circle.

"The Gates?" Duo's voice was high-pitched, he sounded like a very young child in his panic. "Are we going to run away?! Can we 'port to another planet?!"

Solo was silent. His eyes were fixed on the distant light.

"Solo?!" Duo tugged wildly at his mentor's arm, trying to get his attention. His eyes were round, his small face white. A trembling lump in his pocket poked its head out, took one look at the light on the horizon and vanished again with a faint, inarticulate whimper.

"What a clever trick... "

Trowa - everyone - blinked and stared at Solo. He was smiling slightly, as if admiring a good move his chess opponent had made. "It's... energy, pure higher-dimensional energy. The stuff of primordial creation and destruction. He really is an aspect of the Source of All Things. I wonder why he's here, in our universe... "

"Who cares?!" Duo screamed, tugging Solo harder. "Let's get out of here!"

"It might be important, Duo. Besides, it's too late to run."

"Too late?! I thought he couldn't even reach us at all!"

"He imprinted the energy into the spirits of the Lords. And killed them." Solo didn't seem to be listening to his own words; he appeared to be concentrating on something Duo couldn't hear or see. "This power is...something beyond us, beyond any magic. It's the power of sources, the power of the Source of All Things itself, the fundamental energy beyond our dimension, our universe. It's... beyond anything we could control. And it's tainted our Soul-Mind. When the Lords died, their spirits kept the energy Jusan inflicted upon them, and they took it with them to the Halls of the Dead. Our greatest strength... "

"But- I can't feel anything!" Duo stared around him wildly.

"Souls integrate into the collective and order themselves along bloodlines, I've told you that before." Solo sounded strangely scholarly. And resigned. "The Lords' families were the first to be infected, when their kin's souls touched their minds. The Jishin of those great houses are almost all dead now. Some are fighting it as well they can. But when they die, their souls will go to the Halls and to their nearest kin, and take the infection with them. Our house was pretty isolated from others when we stayed behind on different planets, studying alien races while the other Jishin had already retreated. We're not closely related to any of those who have died...so far. But the Soul-Mind itself is corrupted now. It's...inevitable."

"No!" Duo screamed. "Come on! Solo! Let's 'port out of here! The Gates can take us to any sanctuary anywhere in the galaxy, we can-"

"It won't do any good, Duo. The mind - our minds - our souls - can bridge any gap instantaneously. It will follow us. Oh..."

Solo stared with some regret at his arms. His dusk-blue armor shone in the dying light of the afternoon. Spots of squirming darkness were tainting the clear blue.

_"Solo! No!"_

Trowa gasped and hugged his sides at the almost physical horror and grief that overwhelmed him.

Solo glanced down at his charge. Duo's immature armor was still clear blue.

"Ah. You're too young. You won't feel its effects until nearly the whole Soul-mind is corrupted. You only touch your nearest kin in it. But when I die, in a few minutes-"

"No!"

"-then I will infect you, even if the Soul-mind's corruption itself does not reach you directly. Hmm, it's accelerating exponentially. More and more Jishin are dying, carrying more and more of that power to the Halls. It's...I can taste it, Duo. It's a power that doesn't belong here, in this universe. It makes no sense here. It existed before the universe. It created it... " Solo's voice dropped to a whisper. "Well, if the Jishin had to die, I guess it is somewhat flattering to be killed by something so pure, so powerful..."

"No! Solo, fight it!"

"We are," Solo murmured absently, his eyes still on the horizon. His hand reached blindly and grasped Duo's shoulder, then slid down to take his hand. "The spirit of the dead - they have information on this power. They studied it even as it killed them. It's hard- it's beyond so much of what we mere humans can comprehend..." The darkness shimmered and grew in Solo's armor.

"We're not mere humans!" Duo screamed, shaking Solo wildly. "We're the Jishin!"

"Still human, Duo. We were maybe wrong to forget that, to stay so isolated from the galaxy... We let the Scourge kill countless other races as if we were not affected. We didn't care... Ah. Someone may have found the key to this strange energy pattern. She's dead now, of course. But her closest kin have inherited her memories and her knowledge. They're trying to fight the destruction, elaborate on her discovery. Complex... Hmm, dissipate it? Burn it off? Is that possible...?"

Duo stared at his mentor, choking back a small whimper.

"It's slowing. But...there are so few of us left already." The darkness engulfed the back of Solo's armor, crept down his legs. But it wasn't spreading as fast.

Duo yelped. Trowa glanced at the fifteen-year old. The boy was staring at his own arms. Darkness spilled into the clear blue glass of his half-formed armor.

Trowa felt bile rise in his stomach. A reaction to the young man's fear, but also the first effects of the... thing that was killing him. It was... it was... so alien. It was something that shouldn't exist in this universe. It was beyond it. It was... indescribable. Trowa could feel the young mind scream and start to crack under the sheer wrongness of what was touching him.

Solo sighed. His armor was breaking now, the non-light eating away at it from the inside.

"It's too late. There are no longer enough of us left. I see how we can dissipate the energy now... but it's too late."

"No," Duo's whisper trembled, but he sounded suddenly older. "Don't give up, Solo. Don't you all give up. We're the Jishin. We're the oldest race. We can't... can't let all that just die. All those souls, we can't..."

"I can't do it," Solo said simply. "I can't be the last. The Jishin are all one, we can't- we’re not meant to be alone." The armor was beginning to shatter, fall off and evaporate before it touched the ground. Solo's eyes were luminescent, already elsewhere.

He turned towards Duo, reached up and touched his young cousin's hair. "I can't survive our race, Duo. But... the choice is yours now. I'm sorry. I love you."

The non-light flared, outlining Solo's shape in a flash that seared across Trowa's eyes and mind. Blinded, he still heard the sound of a body falling limply onto stone. And then-

Duo made a noise in his throat. Darkness bled into his armor from Solo's soul as it touched Duo's spirit. The plate started to shatter.

His mind flailed under the knowledge-

_Don't leave me alone!_

But he was. He was alone. No more friendly minds of the living around him, embracing him in the warm knowledge of the power of his race...

He was the last -

...and the spirits of the dead had nowhere else to go now, there were no other descendants to link to. They followed Solo's spirit and flooded Duo's young, unprepared mind.

This was not the warm comfort of the Soul-mind, the peaceful dead in their serene Halls. It was flooded by the spirits of those recently departed, who had been ripped apart by madness, twisted by despair, who'd seen their race slaughtered.

They tore at him, along with the alien power that was ripping him apart. To Trowa, it was as if a legion of cruel, insane voices were suddenly screaming at him from all sides.

Time froze - power, his own and that inherited by the Soul-mind of the Jishin, reared up and battled the destruction to a temporary standstill, while his mind cracked and spun, lost in a maelstrom he could not control.

In that frozen second, Duo looked upon the destruction of his race-

\- he thought about joining them in darkness -

And made his choice.

“No.”

The torment of souls and the destructive energy feeding off his mind both shuddered under the strength of that one thought.

“We were too great to die like this.”

Duo stopped fighting it. He threw his mind open to the accumulated knowledge of the corrupted Soul-mind. He felt it rip his inexperienced psyche apart, but that was unimportant. Now. Now he knew it all. The information was there now, at his fingertips. The pattern to Juusan's energy that Solo had mentioned, that could beat the alien menace.

“Twilight or no, we were too great. We were the Jishin. And I am not going to let that be forgotten. We are dead - I am dead. But I am not going to give up. It will be the last thing I- we do. We will go into the darkness, but Juusan is coming with us.”

There was a flicker and a sudden flare of the sick corruption. And then it was gone, dissipated into heat and energy.

Duo was on his hands and knees next to Solo's body. Catapulted to an abnormal maturity by the overwhelming tidal wave of all the dead souls into his young mind, his armor was now fully formed, and starting to curl into strange, disturbing shapes. It was blacker than despair. Duo stayed frozen for a few seconds, and then slowly lifted his head towards the light on the horizon. Juusan's presence was growing stronger, searching. Checking his handiwork, probably. Making sure all the Jishin were dead.

Duo's hands crushed the rock beneath them with almost casual strength.

But not yet. No, not yet. That essence that had destroyed them had only been a portion of Juusan's power. That...was too great to fight headlong. Duo had now the entire power of his race at his disposal, their accumulated knowledge of magic, and he had nothing left to lose. But he wasn't sure he could win, even with the strength now at his disposal. And he had to take Juusan with him. That was an imperative. The only thing that mattered.

He smiled like death, while the soul of a dead race within him screamed its defiance at the darkness.

Without a single glance back at the planet that had given him birth, the young man spun around and marched towards the stone structure. A surge of power and the Gates opened.

Center. Juusan was heading towards Center. The voices all agreed on that one point. Juusan would want to re-source himself. The Thirteenth Power, the thirteenth aspect of the Source Of All Things, had a plan that was paramount to him. He had to go to Center to follow it. He would probably eliminate all traces of life from Center as a matter of course, a preemptive strike, just to make sure there would be no interference while he re-sourced himself. It was why he'd eliminated the Jishin as a first step.

But he wouldn't have the opportunity to reach his source because Duo was going to kill him.

The Gates hummed briefly. Duo’s mind flashed and set the coordinates to an old dead planet that no longer appeared on any star chart. He wanted to go to Center too, but not right away. Caution first. If he went straight to Center and any hint of his existence led there, Juusan would send an army ahead of his arrival - or another herald - and turn the entire place to ash. Retribution would come, but it needed to be carefully planned. Right now he would run and hide. Plan and plot. But eventually he would make his way to Center like a thief in the night, and there he would wait. 

In a flash, the black figure was gone.

Trowa stood up slowly in the empty room with smooth walls... He shook himself, trying to detach himself from the memories that had nearly overwhelmed him at the end. The sadness remained. The wheel turns, Trowa thought painfully, but the words did not bring their usual comfort. The wheel had stopped turning for the Jishin. That was what the end of a species meant.

He sighed, dispelling the memories that were not his own. He grabbed Svale by the collar as she trotted up to Duo, and shoved G away as the man opened his mouth. Quatre was following him as he marched the two old ones out the door. Chang, looking dazed, spurred himself into motion and followed the shaman without looking back; his face was a cold, arrogant mask, but his eyes burned with a darkness that was now familiar to Trowa. Heero was already gone. He'd seen his target; he probably didn't give a damn about the rest.

"I had to do it," Svale sighed very softly. And Trowa knew she was right. Oh, they all knew about Jusan now - Juusan, rather, the Thirteenth Power, immortal guardian of the stars. They knew more about him than they ever wanted to. They'd felt his power to the center of their souls. And his utter ruthlessness. That was crucial, but it wasn't the only reason Svale had wanted to show them the end of the Jishin.

It had been about Duo. About learning to trust him as deeply as they needed to. About understanding why he'd done to them what he had. Trowa glanced back at the silent figure at the center of the room. He was still angry at Duo for what had happened to Quatre. But he understood it now, in his blood, his soul, his bones. Juusan was so alien that Trowa knew he would never be able to comprehend his motivations, beyond the fact that the Scourge would destroy all life on Center just because that was easier and safer for him. But Duo... Duo and his human choices and madness and desire for revenge, those he understood. He could predict how Duo would behave now, because in the same situation, faced with the same loss, Trowa would probably have chosen much the same path.

Trowa pushed G ahead and led the others away. This moment of privacy was his peace offering to the Jishin. The chance to start with a clean slate. He thought that Duo understood this.

They left Duo alone in the room of memories, a small, deadly smile on his lips and blood dripping down his arms and hands from the mutilating spikes of his armor, falling to the floor in a steady, implacable drip... drip... drip...

 

Next Chapter: A Source of Trouble

Yeaaaah, maybe something lighter next week


	34. A Source of Trouble

"This planet's gone to hell in a hand basket!" Duo lifted his braid from his neck. The braid seemed to pick up the idea that he was hot and promptly coiled and tightened itself, leaving only a thin rope instead of the looser plait.

Then the Jishin's spirit armor rippled and changed from scruffy leathers to thin pants and a tank top, outlining arms and chest, not a warrior’s build but still rippled with lithe muscles and at that point Wufei realized he was staring. He tore his eyes away to glare at some harmless clump of lichen clinging to a rock.

"It's just hot, Jishin. Are you so weak this is a problem for you?" Shenlong has already coiled up and down his back, torso and arms and turned on the cooling system.

"It's not that it's hot, Dragon. It's the fact that we're somewhere near the polar circle and it's hot that's got me intrigued," Duo sneered back.

"We knew there'd be consequences in casting the shield spell around the whole planet. I suspect this is one of them," Svale chipped in placidly. She was sitting on a rock a few feet away, staring at what looked like an active volcano over the next ridge. It wasn't very high, but its large cone was a few hundred meters in diameter and smoking. Everything in a mile radius was blackened. But it was much hotter than its mere presence could explain. It had been hot since Duo had teleported them from the main Jishin sanctuary to a smaller one nearby, two hours away from this place.

It had not been Wufei's idea to go on a day-trip with the Jishin and the crone. But he admitted that they needed a proper power supply for the shield. If the spell wasn't protecting them when Jusan arrived-

...No. Juusan...The knowledge forced upon him two days ago, in the Jishin room of memories, prowled in the back of his mind, stalking him. He resented it; it confused him. The very similarities between his own tragedy and that of the Jishin created a link between them that he did not want, that he despised. It made him furious to even think about it, as if the Jishin were trying to creep into his head again, without even trying this time. And the way Duo had walked out of that room, head high and eyes determined, less than an hour after re-witnessing the destruction of his race... apparently accepting that his allies had needed to see that... Wufei knew, deep down, that he would not have had the strength of mind and purpose to do that, not that easily. That knowledge also burned in the back of Wufei's mind, a mixture of anger, self-directed disappointment and something that was too close to respect for comfort.

So now he concentrated on killing the Scourge - whatever his name - and that was a whole lot less confusing and ambiguous.

They needed the shield when Juusan arrived. For the shield to work, they needed proper power to supply it; the magic Heero had fed into the shield would fade away within a few months. The strange little man with the long nose and ugly hairdo had said that he and his fellow 'wardens' had located two of the three power stones needed to fuel the spell. He'd given them a location, which turned out to be near an old Jishin mound with a teleport circle in it, so Duo had teleported them here to save time Wherever 'here' was...

"I never imagined the side-effects of the shield would be this bad though." Duo wiped the sweat from beneath bangs that had lost a lot of their bounce. "Stone and bone, Svale, we're not even in the source yet."

"Oh, but in a way, we are!" Svale cackled. Her eyes were still fixed on the volcano as a drift of yellow smoke trickled over its rim and tumbled gently down into the shallow plain below. "The shield has weakened the limits between the real world and the world of sources. That's why it's been so warm ever since we exited the teleport circle. This source appears to like things hot and smoky, and it's spread its influence for miles around."

Duo muttered something about ‘hand basket' again.

"Of course, I wish G had found a power stone in a slightly friendlier source," Svale muttered, eyes narrowing until they almost drowned in wrinkles. "I have a feeling this one's a doozy."

"Friendly source? That's a fucking contradiction in terms if I ever heard one," Duo snorted.

In response, Svale burst out into a high, loud cackle. "Oh, that's not true, Maxie! If you're one of Center’s children, and you know your way around her, then you'll know there are plenty of nice sources. Trowa is a wise man! He opted to go to the Anima source rather than this one!"

"Is it friendlier?"

Svale just laughed again. Wufei found the noise particularly grating. He'd have rather gone with Trowa and Quatre. But Svale had judged that Trowa could get the power stone from the other source with no difficulty, whereas there would probably be a fight for this one.

Who said fight, said Wufei and Heero. And Svale, because she was apparently the expert on sources in their group besides the shaman. And the Jishin, though he'd said he'd just teleport them back and forth and cheer from the sidelines.

Considering the company, Wufei was in a great hurry to see this trip end already.

"Why are you two dawdling around here for?" he asked.

Svale and Duo exchanged a knowing look before they both glanced at him a bit condescendingly. Wufei felt his teeth clenching to the point where they were about to crack. The Jishin had apparently forgiven the old witch for what she'd put him through - Wufei would have killed her, long before she could have dragged him into that room and put his pain on display for all to see. Cold-blooded creatures, the both of them. If they didn't stop giving him those pitying looks, he'd be testing the temperature of said liquid with his dragon's fangs.

"We're checking out the opposition, Chang," Duo drawled. "This is a big source, and it contains some kind of powerful artifact. That means trouble. You do know what a source is, right, Dragon?"

"Certainly," Wufei ground ou. "So why aren't we going in there and taking the damn thing?"

"... You don't know what a source is," Duo sighed. "Let me explain-"

Wufei sniffed contemptuously and prepared to walk down the ridge, only to find his way barred by Svale.

"No, no, no handsome! You really need to understand this, and I can tell you all about it. Let me sit on your lap and-"

"Very well, Jishin. You have five minutes. Explain." Wufei rounded on Duo, ignoring Svale's disappointed whine. Why did she always do that? Wufei was so not interested in any form of physical contact with her that it would take terms normally employed for higher mathematics to describe it, and yet still she persisted. It was as if she were doing it on purpose! And he knew that unless he did something to shake her off, she'd follow him around and attach herself to his leg at any opportunity. Blows didn't seem to faze her – it was more than annoying! That left the bloody Jishin as his only source of arcane knowledge, now that the seer and the shaman were not available, and Wufei didn't like this one bit.

If Duo had even smirked, there would probably have been violence, but apparently the Jishin was paying only scant attention to the scene. His eyes were still fixed on the volcano.

"A source is a fracture in our reality," he started without preamble. "It's a doorway to a dimension beyond ours, made up of pure energy. Very complex, highly ordered energy. The sources are tiny cracks, so we don't get much of that energy seeping through. Which is good, they're hard enough to deal with as it is. So it's like having a wyrm stuffed through a very small aperture; in any one source, we only see a tail, an eye, a claw, a handful of scales...that's why sources are widely different, even though they all lead to the same place. With me so far, Dragon? Tell me if your brain starts overheating."

"Just-... tell me why we can't go in there, take the damned power supply-"  
"Because powerful sources have Gods."

"There are no such things as Gods.”

There was a tense silence from Duo and Svale. The latter cleared her throat.

"Handsome, we're within stone's throw of a very powerful source and its boundaries are practically nonexistent. This is a really, really, really bad time to be an atheist."

"Or a techno-cabalist space monkey with less knowledge about the arcane than my Imp," Duo muttered, eyes still on the volcano. On his shoulder, the little stone creature smirked and stuck a tiny barb-like tongue at Wufei who felt his temper slip a bit more towards the point of spontaneous combustion.

"Look," Duo said before Wufei could explode, finally turning to face the Dragon and address him properly. "I know they're not real Gods-"

"Maxie."

"We're gonna be in trouble with this guy anyway, Svale, when we try to take his magical whazit away from him. Might as well go for the burn. Okay, listen up, Dragon, this bit is really, really important. The power of sources is arcane and highly complex. As soon as it comes through into our world, it can’t be raw primordial energy anymore, in the same way water dropped into a freezer can’t choose to not turn into ice. It automatically organizes itself into something coherent, and it picks up and matches the arcane patterns it finds around it. Some of those arcane patterns originate from Center’s life-force, but mainly they come from humans, ever since we colonized the planet way before the very First Cull. The arcane is fueled by people's spirit, thoughts and beliefs. So the sources adapt themselves blindly to those beliefs. Most people, yeah, even magically inert techno-chimps like yourself-"

"Watch it, Maxwell."

"-believe, deep down, that there's Gods everywhere. When something goes wrong, a tiny part of you believes that fate has it out for you. That there's some evil spirit in the rock that tripped you out of nowhere. A gremlin in the machine that broke at the worst time without explanation. Ghosts on an old battlefield, or something alive and benevolent in the field with rich loam where things grow beautifully. It's human nature. The sources are just mindless energy, but they adapt to that and echo what we believe in."

"They're a mirror to our nature, and they reinforce it, by leaking magic and arcana and faith back into the world," Svale murmured in the background. "Gods are as real as our belief, and their reality reinforces our faith that humanity is more than a technologically advanced animal. They teach us about ourselves, if we're willing to listen." She was staring at the volcano blindly and actually sounded serious this time. Until she fumbled into the black cloth bag she'd brought with her and brought out a small bottle. She uncorked it and Wufei could smell the alcohol ten feet away.

Duo had apparently not noticed that their font of knowledge on sources was attempting to get shit-faced. "Because humans are the highest form of life on this planet, bar a few oddities like Fen, we imprint the most on the sources. That means that inside each powerful source is a God, a representative of some particular belief, piece of lore or old myth, something gleaned from the human zeitgeist. We call them Gods because that's what they often believe themselves to be, and because within the limits of the source they are all-powerful, so it's very unwise to piss them off. You see what I'm getting at?"

"All-powerful?" Wufei asked, voice dripping with disbelief. He'd heard about sources, of course. Most people had; there were a few scattered about the galaxy. They were dangerous, they interfered with electrical systems that weren’t properly shielded. Smart Dragons avoided them or nuked them from orbit. But of their exact nature he'd only heard rumors, and, as he'd been brought up by a technologist race, he'd believed that most of those rumors were mere superstition.

Of course, that was actually true: they were the embodiment of superstitions. With powers. Great.

"The energy that creates them is... beyond anything you can imagine," Duo said softly, his eyes blind and lost in the past. Then he shook himself and looked thoughtfully at the crater. "Within the limits of its crack in reality, that energy has its own law of physics and completely ignores ours. Fortunately, though the energy that creates them is all-powerful, the Gods themselves tend to obey strict rules that are born of the pattern they adopted. They can be placated by worship, or gifts, or they, er, what's a good example. Say this source's power picked up a pattern that expresses itself in...oh...say, a dragon!"

Wufei glared and Duo smirked.

"Aren't dragons really mean, master?" Imp asked innocently.

Duo's smile faded and Svale choked on her liquor.

"Now that I come to think of it...that does look like a dragon's lair..." Duo stared at the volcano and he didn't look amused.

"You're talking about a huge mythical beast? A flying reptile?" Wufei asked, still not sure he believed any of this.

"Yeah. A big lizard with wings. Highly cunning, resistant to magic, extremely territorial and quite ornery." Duo looked like he'd rather not have thought of the possibility. He and Svale were staring at the smoking cone and giving each other worried glances. "But okay. If it's a dragon, then, despite the fact it is born from an energy beyond our universe that has no known limitations, it will behave exactly like a dragon."

"Which don't exist."

"They exist in our minds!" Duo snapped, rubbing the bridge of his nose savagely. "So it'll exist here in all its fiery and scaly glory! But it'll still be killable by a hero's spear through the heart, and you’ll find it lying on a bed of gems and all that other legendary tripe! Are you getting this?!"

"Why is it sitting in that volcano if it's a powerful creature and the limits between sources and the real world have faded?" Wufei ground out.

"...Good question. I'm not sure myself..." Duo rubbed the sweat from the back of his neck thoughtfully.

"Gods tend to stick to their habits and territories," Svale put in, taking a swig from her bottle, apparently to settle her nerves. "Their rules are almost as constrictive as the boundaries of the sources that normally hold them captive, even when the latter have eroded. They don't have the imagination for world conquest, or for going further than a day or two away from their source. That doesn't mean the shield hasn't caused some almighty messes across the planet! The other wardens have been keeping track of it. The town of Lopus woke up three days ago covered in flowers, plant life growing out of every crack and crevice, which is funny because they had no idea they lived that near a source. It was a very quiet one, just a spring deity or dryad or something. Apparently she decided the town wasn't pretty enough and made a trip."

"That sounds nice," Imp commented. Wufei wondered how stupid it was, and then remembered what Iwanohone had looked like. Yeah, a Jishin and his pet would probably find that attractive.

"Well, less pretty is the fact that the river Reg has flooded the plains all around it repeatedly in the past few days. It's a mighty river born of a source, some river God archetype that creates a hundred thousand cubic feet per second of water out of thin air just because he can. When he goes for a walk outside his source, it's kinda noticeable. The nomads of Elseni have been beset by djins and devils that normally stay nice and safely in their sources. If a pissed-off Elsen nomad shows up on our doorstep one day, asking who's to blame for the shield, you all tell them I had nothing to do with it, okay? Oh, and the entire island-continent of Dath sunk to the bottom of the ocean without a tremor the other day."

"Dath?" Duo looked puzzled.

"Yeah. Horrible place, all rocks, sulphur springs and deserts, nobody lived there except a few Troglodytes who could probably stand a bath anyway. For all I know, that wasn't because of any source. I wasn't aware Dath had any. Maybe the island realized it was the arse-end of the planet and decided to commit suicide."

"Can we get back to this volcano and this stone we're supposed to fetch?" Wufei asked tightly, trying to drown out Svale's grating cackle.

"We're getting there, Fei."

"Wufei!"

"Whatever. The important thing about whatever's lurking in that source over there, is that it has rules. It has to obey them, it doesn't have a choice. But we have to play along too. Or we're toast. That's why Svale and I are studying the place. We'll figure out what lives there, what the rules are, and how best to use them to our advantage. Do you get it now?"

"So there's a powerful entity in there that obeys its own logic and will probably attack us," Wufei summarized.

"Yes."

"So it's probably not a good thing that while you and Svale were busy observing this volcano carefully from a distance, Heero went back a ways to get down into that gully over there and marched right into it."

There was a tense three seconds while Duo and Svale stared around wildly, finally noticing the absence of the fourth member of their party.

"Imp!" Duo picked up the little creature and hurled it into the air. Its stone wings flapped, carrying it higher - however aerodynamically impossible that was, a fact that somehow annoyed Wufei almost as much as the disrespectful creature itself.

"I can't see him, master!" the small speck in the sky wailed, its voice tiny in the stillness around the volcano.

Duo swore in an unknown tongue that seemed to torch the air around them. "Why didn't you say anything?!" he snarled, glaring at Wufei.

"Say what? I was about to follow him. I have no desire to spend any more time with the two of you than I have to," Wufei answered coolly. "I was just seeing what was holding you two up before I did so."

"Godsdammit, Wuf-"

"Less talking, more running, handsome!" Svale shouted, already halfway down the ridge where they'd stopped.

\--- 

The approach to the crater was arduous. It had cracked and torn the land around it, leaving gullies and canyons. Wufei would have used Shenlong to fly, but he realized now that Svale's knowledge of what lay ahead might be valuable. And he felt no desire to carry her! She was springing up the rocks as lightly as a goat, so she wasn't holding them back too badly.

"Heero?!" she suddenly shouted.

Fearing the worst, Wufei scrambled up the lip of a gully, in time to see Heero come marching down what looked like a direct path up to the crater.

"He's okay!" Svale's voice echoed with honest relief.

"It'd take more than a stupid source to dent that thick head," Duo chuckled, climbing up behind Svale. "He doesn't look like he's got the stone with him, though."

Heero was scowling. It wasn't a reassuring expression. He'd spotted them and was walking towards them quickly.

"This way," he said as the group met him near the start of the path.   
"What?"

"Hey, Heero! What was the bright idea, running off like that-"

Heero ignored Duo, walked past Svale as if she weren't there, and grabbed Wufei by the wrist.

"Hey!" Wufei tried to rip his hand free. It was as if it were caught in solid Gundanium. He tried to dig his feet in and he still staggered a few steps after Heero. How strong was this man?!

"They need at least two. There has to be a choice," Heero stated. If it was meant to be an explanation, it rather failed to explain anything. Wufei glanced around helplessly to see Duo and Svale follow a few feet behind, looking just as puzzled.

"Wait!" Wufei snarled. Shenlong flowed down his arm at his mental command. It surged beneath Heero's bruising hold on his wrist, and pried the fingers away.

"Come on." Heero let his hand drop, but the look he gave Wufei suggested it would be unwise not to comply. Wufei seethed, but he'd wanted to get this over with anyway.

"Lead on," he muttered.

"Whoa, nice Portal O' Dread!" Svale whistled behind them.

The path had apparently been carved right into the sides of the volcano's cone, leading directly to the crater. An arch of thick black basalt lanced over the road. It had been carved in the shape of piles of gigantic skulls.

"Bit over the top, if you ask me," Duo sniffed. "Oy, Heero! Wait up! It's stupid to just go barging in like that! This god apparently has a rather underdeveloped sense of hospitality!"

"No matter," Svale sighed. Heero had, of course, completely ignored the Jishin and walked beneath the arch of rock as if it weren't there. "We're in the source already, we passed the boundary markers as soon as we stepped onto the path. We better play it through."

"Great."

"I just hope it's not a dragon," Svale muttered. "They like to give you puzzles. The 'answer now or I'll eat you' type. For some reason, I just can't concentrate on a quiz with twenty tons of murderous scale and brimstone staring at me, licking its lips."

"Yeah, foul-tempered, arrogant bastards, those dragons. They think they're smart even though they have a brain the size of a walnut," Duo commented loudly and cheerfully.

Go and get the power supply, Wufei told himself. Kill the Jishin later.

"Be polite, Maxie!" Svale's staff whistled, catching even the usually quick and cautious Jishin off his guard.

"Ouch! Godsdammit, woman!" Duo shouted.

\- 'Ow!' the young boy shouted, rubbing his head vigorously, as Solo, his mentor, smiled at him with an equal blend of sardonic amusement and love -

Wufei shook his head sharply. Not thinking about that. Jishin. They were just Jishin. They had been the Dragon's enemies. Dirty, traitorous magic users. Tricksters, playing with hundreds of worlds as if they were mere toys. Just Jishin...

The arrival at the lip of the crater was a welcome distraction.

The path descended into the crater, which wasn't a poisonous lake of boiling magma, to everyone's relief. Weird clumps of extrusions poked up from the gritty black rock, twisted black basalt and smoking hot stone. Vapor twisted out of holes, and the stink of sulfur was cloying. But like the skull-decorated arch of stone above the path, the crater showed signs of construction. There was a wide circle of narrow man-high stone columns around a huge altar in the center. Three figures stood in front of the altar, completely still. Wufei had to look twice before realizing they were not statues.

"Oh. It's an arena. Some kind of Trial." Svale didn't sound all that relieved at the absence of flying, fire-breathing reptiles.

"What does that mean?" Wufei examined the three men- well, it looked like men - waiting for them. Heero had already gone on ahead and crossed into the circle of stones.

"Well, you know those bedtime stories about a prince who has to get the magical Knitting Needle o' Doom from the Dread Palace of Never-Sober-Land in order to defeat the Evil Sorcerer of Odd and rescue the princess?"

"Have a point, woman," Wufei murmured menacingly.

"You know how the prince has to face off with three challenges at some point in those stories? Depending on which mythology you're dealing with, it can be three puzzles, three fairy godmothers you have to do favors for, or three bruisers you have to fight."

Wufei examined the three figures waiting for them. They were huge, easily a head taller than both Heero and himself, and overburdened with well-oiled muscle that seemed to glow in the sick sunlight filtering through the sulfur clouds. They were dressed in crude leather armor with pieces of fur sticking out in places where the hide hadn't been cured. Rings of metal were fastened on the leather to strengthen them. They were wielding, respectively, a big club, a boar spear and a sword, though the latter looked more like something from a butcher's shop, the pride and joy of a really large butcher. Two of them had beards down to their bellies and hair sprouting wild from beneath crude helmets.

"I'm thinking we didn't get the fairy godmother option," Duo muttered, pretty much summing up Wufei's own impression.

 

Next Chapter: Not the three fairy godmothers option

That’s actually a good thing, guys; them fairy godmothers have a mean right hook.


	35. Not the Three Fairy Godmothers Option

"So... is there anything in particular I should know?" Wufei asked Svale slowly as he walked towards the circle of stone columns. Heero had already entered the arena again and marched up to the men before the altar. He appeared to be talking to them. They showed no response, still as statues, the club, spear and huge sword at rest. Heero turned and looked back expectantly at Wufei, but the Dragon didn't feel like running blind into an unknown and potentially hostile situation.

"This type of source is known as a Trial. They'll make you fight for the stone we're after. They'll have conventions for the combat. You stick to them. If you violate the rules of the source, things get really ugly." Svale was talking quickly as she followed Wufei, jumping over the occasional chunk of volcanic rock as if she were on springs. "Do not attack them until they say so, and make sure you do not step out of the circle of stones. Chances are that would be an automatic forfeit. If you lose, they will probably claim the right to kill you."

"Great. Anything else?"

"No. Just beat the crap out of them."

"I can see why we brought you along," Wufei muttered sardonically, stepping between two stone columns.

The men had been completely immobile, ignoring Heero. But as soon as Wufei stepped into the arena, they hoisted up their weapons.

Shenlong whispered its deadly chant as it cloaked him, the Gundanium energizing to the tensile strength of tempered steel, then beyond. The eyepiece flashed several warnings about interference from a mystical source it was shielding its functions from - the Source itself, presumably, causing static with something modern that didn’t fit its medieval template. 

The dragon fang at his wrist coiled, ready. But the men made no further move. Heero turned his back to them, apparently completely unafraid, and walked to Wufei's side.

"The Three Dooms of Crag Kernaucht answer the challenge!" One of the men boomed out. He was the biggest, hairiest one, with the mother of all swords.

"The Three what?" Wufei muttered. Heero stood next to him, arms crossed over his chest. He appeared to find absolutely nothing odd about any of this. Maybe Heero was knowledgeable about Sources as well. Too bad he didn't share much; they could have left Svale at home.

"As the challenged, the rules are ours," the man continued to announce. Wufei had the feeling that if he stepped out of the circle, the 'Doom' would freeze in that position, mouth open around unfinished words, and wait for Wufei to enter again to continue. Not really human, he reminded himself. They're just some sort of... of manifestation of a base and foolish superstition. Complete with bloody big weapons.

"Each Doom may choose which challenger to combat," the hairy thing with the sword proclaimed.

"Is that why they needed at least two of us?" Wufei asked Heero - knowing this would probably not interrupt the slow speech of the creature. Heero nodded once, curtly.

"The challenger may choose his weapon. Blade, fist, or magic."

"How did you know they needed a choice of warriors to challenge?" Wufei asked curiously. Heero looked at him oddly, as if that question was completely bizarre. The answer must be obvious to him.

"The loser's life will be forfeit to the winner. The winner will choose his doom!"

He could stop shouting, Wufei thought, a bit tiredly; we're not that far away, and the echoes carry for miles in this volcano.

"If the challengers defeat the three Dooms, the Gem of Courage will be theirs."

That must be referring to the small shining rock on the altar behind them. Yes, this really felt like a fairy story. No wonder his ancestors had decided early on in their conquests of foreign worlds to never set foot on Center. Crazy place...

"Apparently you have to be in the circle to play," Svale announced behind them. "Me and Maxie will stay on the sidelines and cheer you two on, okay?"

Wufei glanced back. The crone and the Jishin were outside the circle of columns. The latter was sitting on a chunk of rock, looking on with interest as if he expected to be entertained. Bastard.

"Hey, don't look at me," Duo chuckled in response to Wufei's glare. "You and Heero are the designated fighters. I'm the suave intelligent magic-user of the team. Besides, all this ritual combat, feats-of-arms and manly duels, you know, not really my thing."

"Yes, you prefer tricks and traps and stabbing people in the back," Wufei countered coldly.

"The first Doom will now choose his challenger!" the hairy leader shouted, completely oblivious to all the interruptions. It cut Duo's irritated retort, and Wufei turned his back contemptuously on the Jishin.

"The Trial begins!"

A sudden change came over the three men. Their pose became less stiff and artificial. They lowered their weapons, and the eyes that settled on Wufei and Heero were alive and fierce with the lust of combat.

"Such tiny little challengers, brothers," the second hairy one chuckled, a sound like gravel being chewed. "To be asleep for centuries, only to be awoken for that. It's hardly worth it."

"I'll kill them both," the third one announced, taking a step forwards.

Wufei had thought that fighting these- these mannequins would be like bashing through a theater’s props. But now he re-evaluated the situation. These were, in fact, real men, or at least he had to consider them so. They moved naturally, with great ease for people of their height and weight, and they carried their huge weapons as if they were as light as children's toys.

They also looked fairly slow. And stupid. Not too much of a challenge, Wufei judged.

The first man to step forward was relatively smaller than the other two, which still put him at half a head higher than either of the challengers and nearly twice the weight in muscle. He was bald, his long face jutting into a sharply defined nose like an eagle's beak. Savage black tattoos decorated his forehead, curved around his eyes. He didn't have any metal reinforcements in his armor, which was lighter than that of his 'brothers'. A choker of small bones and a tiny animal skull was clasped around his neck and crude symbols decorated the leather armor over his chest. He was the one bearing the spear, clonking its base on the ground like a staff. He surveyed them both slowly. Finally his eyes settled on Heero.

"I accept your challenge, blue-eyed one. Defeat me if you can, or your life will be mine!"

"Could these guys' speeches be any cornier?" Duo muttered in the background.

"They're elemental representations of our belief system, Maxie. You're not gonna ask them to be original as well, are you?"

"Shut up, you two." Wufei stepped back to the limit of the circle, to leave Heero some room. He was a warrior, and as such he never underestimated an adversary. The two wits sitting in the peanut gallery should be careful not to distract their ally.

Heero stepped forward and waited. The only sign he was ready was Wing, flowing over his limbs until it was fully deployed. Wufei crossed his arms over his chest and watched attentively. He'd only witnessed Heero's abilities once, when he himself was at the receiving end. If he was supposed to fight alongside Heero as an ally, he needed to have a good grasp of his style, especially since the man was far from conventional as a fighter. The way he waited for an attack, as if he had little or no initiative... or maybe he was waiting to get the full measure of his adversary. Wufei remembered how Heero had taken his blows - with almost condescending ease - until he'd seen... something. And then he'd attacked like an avalanche.

The Doom twisted his spear to grasp it before him with both hands. He braced himself, let loose a fearsome shout and ran towards Heero, who just stood there, waiting. Wufei had a few heart-clenching moments to wonder if anybody had taught Heero the proper way to fight a spearman, or even use Wing's beam saber, hanging unused at his belt. Then the Doom was upon Heero, who dodged out of the weapon's path and its following counter swing. Wufei felt a hiss of air reach him thirty feet away from the swift, deadly thrusts of the spear. Heero seemed to be nearly pinned by each thrust... only to remove himself from the sharp metal point just before it connected with almost taunting ease, like a fly dodging the frustrated thwack of a paper by a particularly slow man. 

The Doom roared again, grabbed the spear at mid-shaft and swung it up in a huge gesture, ready to bring it down and impale his adversary. Wufei frowned. There had been at least three ways Heero could have finished the fight then and there with that kind of wide, violent move leaving the man unprotected. Heero had the speed; he'd demonstrated that by dodging the weapon so easily in the first place. What was he waiting for?

Heero moved easily out of the way at the last moment, and the spear impacted the ground where he'd been standing. Instead of shattering, it sunk to its crosspiece into the rock of the arena. Heero took another step back. He seemed to be thinking about something- judging something-

Wufei didn't know how he knew it: something in Heero's stance warned him, a warrior like the Dragon could feel it, if not explain. Wufei knew the exact moment that Heero judged he'd seen whatever it was he wanted to see and decided to kill his opponent.

The Doom hadn't felt the change in the winds of battle. He made another one of those wide, savage swings -

The spear never descended. Heero didn't even bother to prepare a dodge or parry; his fist shot out and smashed into the Doom's face.

The crack of armored knuckle against bone seemed to shudder through Wufei's bones. The Doom was thrown back several feet. He twisted and fell to one knee, the spear supporting him. His lower face was quickly bathed in blood and his nose was bent out of shape. His eyes were dazed. On the other hand, his skull wasn't crushed. Wufei remembered the strength of Heero's blows all too well. This creature, this 'Doom', was definitely not human.

"What exactly does it take to win a match?" Wufei asked Svale quietly, keeping his eyes riveted on the adversaries.

" ...That depends. They didn't say. Not death, since the winner can choose to kill the loser. Either one of the fighters has to forfeit, or be rendered incapable of fighting. Throwing them from the circle will do it as well."

None of which would be easy, Wufei judged, as the Doom stood up, not looking particularly injured beyond a broken nose.

"You are stronger than you look, little warrior," the Doom spat out, his voice thick and clotted from the injury he'd sustained. "But I, the Doom of the Spear, chose you for a reason. I can see that your body is strong, but your mind is weaker than a child's."

The heel of the spear struck the ground with a crash that seemed to echo and grow. The ground started shaking, rocks groaning ominously. Wufei staggered and stared uneasily at the volcano around them. What-

Shenlong's analyzer flashed a warning into his eye. The movement beneath his feet was an illusion: an image and a sense of motion imposed on his optic nerves and his inner ear. Which meant a psychic attack. Very primitive, though. The creature might have more magic in store, though...

Heero hadn't even stumbled. Apparently the illusion had had no effect on him whatsoever. The Doom glared at him angrily, then he made a gesture with his hand, as if he were reaching out to crush Heero's head from a distance.

Another mental attack, Shenlong analyzed. A classic, aimed at any flaws in the psyche of-

"Heero?!"

Duo had surged to his feet behind Wufei, his voice shocked and alarmed. Heero had shuddered and sunk to one knee, eyes wide and his hands at his temples, gripping the wild brown hair as if in pain or confusion.

Wufei cursed and whirled towards Duo. "The buffer! Didn't you teach him how to use Wing's psychic buffer?"

"The what?" Duo asked blankly, eyes fixed anxiously on Heero.

"Wing! You're the one who gave him Wing, didn't you say? Didn't you teach him how to use it?!"

"Use it? I don't know how to use that techno crap! Heero! Get a grip! It's just a simple psychic attack-... fuck, I didn't think Heero had any doubts or fears to feed off of. He's got the psyche of a brick with attitude."

"He's changed a bit since you left, Duo. I think Center did something to him too... " Svale's voice sounded dark with foreboding.

Wufei’s fists clenched. Shenlong had already readied its own buffer, to protect Wufei's mind from a mental attack for a short time, the time it would take for the Dragon to neutralize its origin. His race had fought magic users and mentats for centuries; even the notorious Jishin. This primitive brute was a midget by comparison. But Heero didn't know how to use the more sophisticated aspects of his armor, apparently. Like Duo, Wufei had assumed it would take a hammer the size of the universe to crack Heero's resolve and fighting spirit. But now that he thought about it, he realized that Heero's was the kind of mind where even a small flaw, a tiny seed of doubt, could be a major source of weakness.

While Wufei watched in growing alarm, the Doom had been giving a greasy laughter that was just as theatrical as the rest of it, and twisting his hand about as if he were prodding around Heero's brain matter from a distance. Heero was on his hands and knees, shaking his head slowly, eyes blind, completely helpless.

Instinctively, Wufei fed a few parameters of the problem into Shenlong's inner computer - which instantly came back with an open communication channel to Wing. Wufei blinked in surprise, but then realized that there'd been no reason to suppose Wing's additional instrumentation had been broken just because Heero didn't use them. Could Wufei use the comchannel to communicate with Heero? Tell him about the buffer- maybe even trigger it, if Wing's access codes hadn't been changed? Could he-

But that would be interference. Wufei's tendencies were to fight fair; Dragons were big on ritual duels to establish their hierarchy, and they always obeyed the rules and fought with honor. Helping Heero surreptitiously went against the grain. More importantly, the Dooms might see it as interference. Those brutes probably couldn't tell an ether-carried comchannel from two tin cans tied together with a string, but Wufei's instincts told him that the Source, the complex, orderly energy from outside the universe that created and maintained them, might very well pick up any interference on his part, and then-

The Doom roared again - he apparently liked the effect - twisted his spear to a thrusting position, and ran towards Heero, intending to run him through.

Wufei fought to hold himself back. His mind was already halfway through the routine to trigger Wing's buffer through Shenlong and damn the consequences- but it was too late.

As the spear came straight at Heero's heart, time seemed to pause and stutter in horror. Wufei had taken a helpless step forward -

\- he saw Heero's lips move -

It might have been the word 'mission'.

Heero uncoiled, twisted his body around the spear as it brushed by his chest, came up and struck the Doom in the jaw with the full strength of his body uncoiling behind the blow.

The spear slammed into one of the stone columns around the circle and stood there, vibrating. Its owner flew backwards and landed like a bag of meat near the feet of his brothers. He lay there, unmoving.

Heero had fallen forward on his hands and knees again with a gasp, head bowed, his body tense with pain. What it had cost him to momentarily throw off the paralysis from the attack and strike out against his foe, Wufei could only guess.

Wufei took two steps towards him and was almost bowled over by Duo. The Jishin reached Heero's side in the next instant. He hoisted Heero up, slipping one of the warrior's arms over his shoulders.

"Come on, buddy. Let Chang deal with big n' hairy. Let's see if baldy there did any damage to your brains."

"Don't take him out of the arena, Maxwell," Wufei told him softly as he drew near, an eye on the remaining Dooms.

"Huh? But he's hurt! He can't-"

"Shut up, Jishin!" Wufei speared him with a furious glare. No need to advertise their weakness to the enemy. "Leaving the arena is an automatic forfeit, and besides, they need at least two warriors to challenge. If you remove Heero, then-"

"That's right, Maxie. Don't mess with the Source," Svale confirmed from the sidelines.

"But-"

"It's their right to pick an already wounded opponent," Wufei sneered, turning towards the remaining two Dooms. "I guess they'll do so... if they're dishonorable curs, afraid of a real fight." The Dooms had not proven themselves to be very subtle. They might fall for that ploy.

The second Doom had taken a step forward. He showed absolutely no concern for the body of his fallen brother at his feet. The weapon Wufei had thought was a club, from a distance, turned out to be a hammer with a small head and a thick handle. The Doom swung it negligently onto his shoulder. He was grinning evilly. Wufei's heart sank as the man's eyes passed over him to fix on the Dragon's allies.

"There is no honor in routing such weaklings either way," he announced (what he thought of his brother's defeat had apparently not been included in the Source's script). "So I will fight for my pleasure. I choose you!"

"Now just one damned minute, hairy! Heero's not in any shape to play your stupid games. Go and get chewed up by the Dragon." Duo had moved to stand between Heero and the big, callused finger pointing in their direction, despite the fact that Heero was recuperating fast and standing on his own now. Heero was looking at his own arm, slung over Duo's shoulders, and at Duo; the look on his face was slightly puzzled, as if he couldn't imagine what Duo was doing. Wufei had the sudden intuition that Heero wasn't used to working with other people or being helped by them. At all. The Dragon filed that thought away to examine and worry about later

"I'll leave this 'Dragon' to my brother," the Doom boomed back. "If I cannot have a worthy opponent, I will at least have my entertainment."

"You get your jollies kicking wounded puppies, don't you.” The very end of Duo’s braid was flicking back and forth like a cat's tail, a dangerous little movement. "Look, Chang here is more than willing to kick your sorry ass, so leave Heero out of it."

"It's not Heero he's pointing at, you fool," Wufei growled, drawing near the Jishin's other side.

Duo stared at Wufei, then at the Doom, then at where exactly the Doom's finger was pointing. "Me?! Waitasec! That's not right. Heero and Wufei are your challengers. I'm just-"

"You stepped into the circle, Trickster," Wufei informed him, enjoying this probably a bit more than he should. "They can choose their opponent, it's their prerogative."

"Yeah, but I only- Nai no Kami, I was just gonna sit this one out." Duo rolled his eyes. "What kind of one-sided fight is this gonna be?"

"Heero and I put up with it," Wufei pointed out dangerously. 

"One-sided indeed," the Doom laughed in the background, though Duo was ignoring him. "It will be an easy victory, and an agreeable prize for me."

"But you guys enjoy using your muscles more than your brains," Duo pointed out, prodding Wufei in the chest with a disrespectful finger. "Personally I don't want to end up covered in dirt, blood and-"

"What do you say, brother?" the Doom threw back over his shoulder. "Shall I keep him after I win? We could use a little bitch around, to serve us our mead and polish our weapons."

Wufei wondered what kind of weird 'complex energy source' had judged that the greasy chuckle that followed was absolutely necessary.

" ...guts... " Duo finished weakly, though it looked like his mouth was working on automatic. His eyes had gone wide and blank as hairy's words finally registered. The finger stayed still, poking against Wufei's chest.

"I guess I can try to convince him to switch opponents and fight me in your place," Wufei said in mock compassion, staring pointedly down at that insulting finger dirtying his armor. "If you're that worried about it."

"Oh, is he yours, then?" Hairy threw in Wufei's direction. "I guess I can fight you for the right to own him, then."

Wufei hesitated, but it was worth the insult of being called the Jishin's owner just to see the look that flashed over Maxwell's face for a moment. The insult would soon be repaid. Hairy's days were numbered. Hell, his minutes were numbered.

Duo slowly looked down at the finger against Wufei's chest plate as if he'd forgotten why it was there. He lifted it leisurely in a 'wait a minute' gesture. "On second thought... I did step into the circle... "

Wufei snorted.

"It's the braid," Duo murmured. "I get this all the time... Still, it would be rude of me to leave rock-for-brains without a dance partner. So I'll just... mosey on over and see what I can do to keep him, ah, entertained."

"You do that, Jishin." Wufei reached past him, grabbed a scowling Heero by the arm and headed back to the edge of the circle where Svale was jumping up and down, making 'rah-rah-rah' gestures.

"I wanted to fight," Heero growled.

"Tough. Oh, and Yuy? You and I are going to have a long talk real soon about using Wing to its fullest. Including the helm and sword. You are a strong warrior and you won our confrontation. That gives you the right to claim Wing. I have Shenlong to rely on, now that it is repaired. But if you're not able to fully master a Dragon armor, I will not let you keep it, understood?"

That got him a glare that was as dangerous as the hammer the second Doom was thumping slowly against his palm, but Wufei ignored it.

"So you will be my opponent?" Hairy smirked. "I will allow your man to fight in your stead, if you prefer. Avoid damaging those pretty looks."

"No, no, that's quite alright. The rules are the rules, and you did pick me first," Duo murmured, voice as smooth as a snake slipping over rock.

"You can surrender now," the Doom sneered, hoisting his weapon. "Since the end of this fight is foreordained."

"That is so true. Ah damn, I'm not really into all this hand-to-hand brutality like my two allies are, but still, I'll do my best." Duo rubbed the back of his neck hesitantly, and looked to be about sixteen, if that, and woefully under-armed with his weaponless hands and cut-off outfit offering no protection whatsoever.

The Doom laughed and charged. He took a contemptuous swing at his apparently diffident target.

Duo dropped loosely to one knee, beneath the blow. His hands hit the ground.

The basalt screamed as it ripped itself upwards. A prong of rock lanced up diagonally from between Duo's hands and bashed Hairy in the stomach. The Doom doubled over it with a wide-mouthed gasp. Another slab lifted itself like a trapdoor swinging up behind the Doom, and crashed into his back, slamming him even further against the prong that was now holding him roughly upright. His face went red and a strangled gurgle escaped the twisted lips.

Duo stood up unhurriedly and put a single finger beneath the hairy chin, tilting the face up a bit. Drawing his other hand back slowly.

Black armor surged and writhed over his fingers, forming a jointed spirit-glass glove, heavy and sharp with ugly prongs.

Duo smiled and his voice was still smooth, almost pleasant. "As I was saying, hand-to-hand battle with morons isn't my thing, so just stay still a second and I'll do my best to insure this doesn't last any longer than it absolutely has to."

Wufei realized his lips had twisted into a small, savage smirk; he scowled instead, and glared at the black figure. It wasn't funny. Stupid Jishin. Showing off.

The Dragon stiffened as the third Doom took a step forward. The sword glinted in the pale light. Shenlong's fang was in position in a heartbeat. If that bastard attacked Duo while his concentration was elsewhere-

"Enough. You have won." The third Doom had shown no emotion during either of the previous two fights, or answered his brother's lewd suggestions earlier. His voice was neutral even now.

Duo cocked his head, looking past the heap of rock and dazed adversary in front of him to examine the third fighter and weigh his words. "Oh, yeah, I guess I have at that."

The clawed fist whipped through the air and smashed into Hairy's jaw so hard it shattered the rock behind him. Hairy dropped backwards like he'd been decapitated.

"But as I recall, the winner gets to choose the loser's fate," Duo added coolly. He glanced casually at his glove, and licked a trace of blood from one of the prongs with a cat-like tongue. Then he made a face. "Simulated hemoglobin, bleh. I wouldn't even let my imp drink this shit. Nothing to learn there. Your turn, Fei."

"Wufei," the latter grated out, feeling unaccountably annoyed with the smug, disrespectful, deceitful- he ran out of adjectives. It was true that Duo had just ensured they had won round two out of the three Trials, but Wufei just... didn't like Duo Maxwell. At all.

Duo turned away from his fallen opponent and caught the Dragon's scowl. He didn't step aside as Wufei moved towards the center of the arena. His mouth twisted into a deadly smile, his eyes still bright with battle-lust. Wufei glared back contemptuously.

"Gotta problem, Dragon?"

"You couldn't fight one of these puppets without using your magic?"

Duo's eyes gleamed and his grin became quite feral. "Nah. You piss off a Jishin at your own risk. You might want to remember that."

Wufei moved forward as if Duo wasn't there - let the Jishin move out of his way. Duo only turning slightly, keeping them from crashing together but still tauntingly, dangerously close. Wufei paused, his eyes locking with savage blue.

"He was indeed rude to you, Maxwell," Wufei agreed softly; Duo's eyebrows twitched and he looked momentarily nonplussed, "but if you hang around on the sidelines with the other old woman, what do you expect."

"Oh, it wasn't the 'bitch' jab that got my blood boiling," Duo murmured, eyes like daggers. "It was the assumption that I was yours that was insulting,"

"I agree," Wufei snorted. "I do have better taste than that. But these guys haven't seen anybody for centuries," he added with a shrug, overriding Duo's angry retort. "They probably assume everybody's as desperate as they are."

Duo made a strangled noise in his throat and then smiled like he had when he'd trapped the Doom.

"Dragon-"

"Would you two stop playing footsie and get with the program?!"

Duo looked like someone had socked him with a rubber chicken. Wufei would have enjoyed it if he didn't have the sneaking suspicion he could have been using the Jishin as a mirror in that instant. They both whirled towards Svale, a braid slapping Wufei's shoulder at the speed of Duo's movement.

"You dare, woman-"

"Are you fucking insane, you old-"

There was a discomfited moment of angry silence as they realized they'd shouted at the same time. It was broken three second later by Svale falling off her rock and rolling on the volcanic gravel in fits of laughter.

"Whee! Now I've got Pretty Boy Stereo!" she howled.

Heero was looking at them with narrowed eyes going from one to the other. He seemed both annoyed and a bit mystified, as if he didn't understand what the hell they were playing at but was willing to try bashing their heads together to see if that made any more sense. "One of you should pay attention to our last opponent," he growled.

The swish of the big sword behind them did indicate he had a point. With a killing glare thrown at the Jishin - who failed to topple over dead, contrary creature - Wufei spun around and faced their last adversary.

"You! I know it is your prerogative to choose either one of my allies to fight instead of me," he snarled as the hulking fighter. "That's the rules, there's three of us in the arena, all that. On the other hand... " Wufei slowly cracked his knuckles. "On the other hand, I did make the trip to come here, and I put up with both the Jishin and the crone the whole way. And I'm rather looking forward to a fight at this point. You're not going to disappoint me now, are you?"

The Doom stared at him. Then slowly he extended his huge cleaver, pointing it directly at the Dragon's chest.

"Thank you," Wufei answered politely, and bowed shortly before dropping into a defensive stance.

"Er-"

Wufei glanced behind him in irritation. "Jishin, if you care about obtaining that stone, you will be silent while I-"

"But-" Duo was frowning. In the rising concentration he fostered while in battle, Wufei noted that Duo's face looked uncharacteristically sullen, but his eyes kept darting between the huge cleaver and Wufei. "Not that I give a damn, right, or anything, but you did notice he's got a sword. Right?"

"It'd be hard to miss."

"You could borrow Heero's? If you get killed, that'll be one less to oppose Juusan," Duo added quickly. Wufei wasn't sure why he'd tacked that last detail to his suggestion; it was understood that the Dragon was necessary for the Jishin's revenge.

Wufei turned his back, bracing himself for the attack as his opponent swished the huge cleaver effortlessly.

" ...Wu-"

He'd have borrowed Heero's sword if he could have. He missed his own weapon, broken by Juusan nearly a year ago, and not repaired in the hurry to get Wufei to Center. But the weapon was an extension of the armor; he'd not have time to reprogram Wing's saber to use it with Shenlong, even if Heero had agreed to lend it.

"It's just that he looks stronger and meaner than the last two," Duo concluded quickly, as the Doom started marching slowly towards Wufei.

"So am I," Wufei muttered, leaping to the attack before his opponent could charge him with that poleaxe disguised as a sword.

The calm of battle descended upon him, the heart of the storm. The Doom took a step back to brace himself and swung the sword. Wufei dodged the horizontal cut easily - the bastard was fast though. He leaped back from the counterswing, took another step back as the Doom hefted and hauled his weapon at him again.

The rhythm of the battle moved him before conscious thought could. He surged past the next blow from the sword, closed the distance and jabbed the Doom with a quick punch in the belly. It felt like hitting rock, but his opponent did grunt slightly.

The Doom stepped sideways, wrenching himself away, the closeness a handicap to the swordsman. Wufei didn't let him regain the space he needed for a swing, though, he followed the Doom step for step, fists darting and probing.

He narrowly ducked a frustrated blow from the massive hilt of the great sword, aimed at his head. The Doom tried to hit him again, twisting the sword around so that the blade nearly caught him when the hilt missed. Wufei had to step back. The Doom moved his support foot away, aiming to gain some distance and score a real blow-

Wufei darted forward and kicked the leg out from under him.

The Doom staggered and fell to one knee, shoving at Wufei with the sword to get him to keep his distance. Wufei had already stepped back, letting the man get to his feet.

"Wu- what in the name of the everlovin' Mother Earth are you doing?! Kill him!"

Wufei ignored the Trickster's sudden shout. The Doom rose slowly. His eyes, lost in hair and sun-weathered folds of skin, locked with the Dragon's. The Doom nodded slowly in recognition, one warrior to another.

The sword swished from side to side. Wufei didn't let it distract him, but he did note it. That sword... was going to be a problem

 

The Doom roared his challenge. The sword glinted in the sickening light, cut through a drift of sulfur vapor. The man charged at Wufei like a tank.

The Dragon dodged. He couldn't parry with his armored forearm, as he would a normal sword; he wasn't sure how Shenlong's energy field and Gundanium plating would fare against a potentially enchanted weapon. His motto when fighting magic-users was: 'don't assume anything'. For example, don't assume that something that looked like a reject from a butcher's shop couldn't cut through the powerful metal/energy combination of Dragon armor. That was a good way to lose a limb. Or a head.

The blade hissed through the air as the Doom tried to catch him in the backswing with the dull edge. Wufei crouched beneath it, then jumped - higher, his joined fists hammering against the Doom's shoulder. The creature grunted and flinched - didn't drop the sword though. Wufei used the leverage to gracefully flip himself over his adversary.

He twisted and landed on his feet, behind the Doom, spinning around quick as a cat just as the Doom, with a growl, whirled around, blade slashing in another fearsome downward cut. Wufei was already braced, kicking out-

His armored foot smashed into the flat of the blade near the hilt. The violence of the two opposing movements, focused into one point, snapped the blade cleanly in two.

Wufei stabilized into a crouch as the huge piece of metal thunked to the rocky ground, then he leaped forward. His fist stopped short of the Doom's throat.

The two warriors stared at each other, the culmination of the battle in that shared silence and eye contact. Then the Doom dropped the hilt and small chunk of remaining blade, stepped back and saluted shortly, a fist against his chest. "You are the victor."

A curt nod acknowledged the concession. The Doom waited for a few seconds, but when it was clear that Wufei was not going to give him terms for surrender, the creature bowed slightly and- vanished. So did the two fallen Dooms. The Source's story was told, the actors were whisked away, probably to awaken again the next time someone stepped into the arena, or maybe not at all...

Wufei looked back at his allies, to see the Jishin march towards him, blazing eyes flicking over Wufei's frame as if checking for injuries.

"What in the name of the nine hells was that?!" Duo snarled. His hair was crackling with furious energy, his bangs frazzled, his puffed-up braid curved up tensely, the end bristling and twitching.

"Fighting with honor," Wufei answered smoothly. "I hope you were taking notes."

"You-" Duo took a noisy breath of air as if preparing for a massive outburst, then he let it out just as loudly in a huffy sigh. "Oh, never mind. You won. Yay. Do something that dumb again and I'll kick your ass."

"Jishin, I'd like to see you try."

"Don't make me come over there, boys," Svale warned them sternly. She was already at the altar, examining their prize. "Maxie, Dragon Boy, stop flirting and take a look at this."

"I... am going to kill her," Duo announced calmly, eyes wide and fixed on an empty spot of the arena over Wufei's shoulder.

Wufei opened his mouth to add his own dig... but hesitated. Blue eyes met his, glinting with flickers of emotions being reined in.

"Need help?" Wufei grumbled, his discipline kicking his pride and battle-fervor back to where they belonged.

" ...Probably. She's tougher than she looks," Duo answered gruffly, his lips twitching with a self-mocking smile for an instant at the reluctance of their truce, despite being ultimately faced with a common foe that could, and probably would, obliterate them both quite easily.

And talking about mutual enemy...

Svale went 'Oooohshit!!' as the two powerful warriors turned slowly towards her. She grabbed the stone on the altar and dashed to take cover behind an approaching Heero. The latter was giving them a strange look again. Though the man was hard to read at the best of times, Wufei thought he looked both puzzled and a bit annoyed, as if he were trying to decipher something in a foreign language he'd just started to learn.

Heero reached back without looking and lifted the prise from Svale's grasp. He walked towards them and handed it to Duo without a word. The Jishin smiled at him slightly, then examined the stone.

"Yeah, this will do. It'll need some adaptations, but I think we can build a hearthstone outta this, and use it in one of the cirques. Which is nice to know, after all the trouble we went through to get it. Let's get outta here."

"Yes, this place stinks," Wufei agreed, glaring at the imp which had settled once more on Duo's shoulders to make faces at the Dragon, as it always did when he was less than a few feet from its master.

Svale followed the group, looking outrageously pleased with herself behind her wrinkles.

\---

Next chapter: Parameters of Life and Death 

Romance and Zero go together like a heart-shaped cake and a black hole.


	36. Parameters of Life and Death

Zero was busy calculating the parameters of Juusan's arrival and worrying about the distant fate of the universe, but it did spare a few transactions to drop Quatre a warning about the arrow aimed at his head.

The healer distractedly leaned sideways a few degrees to the left. The arrow brushed by, close enough to stir a few strands of hair, and made a pinging noise and a wooden clatter as it struck the rock behind him.

Quatre quickly glanced around. Trowa was ten feet away, hunkered behind a rock, and hadn't noticed. Good. After a second of consideration, the healer put out a discreet foot and nudged the broken arrow's remains into a small bush, out of sight. Trowa had to concentrate on repelling their attackers and getting them to the Anima source. He didn't need to be distracted by close shaves.

Oh, by the way, Zero, if you could spare a moment - I know you're busy with the fate of the universe in ten billion years and all that important stuff, but would you mind telling me who took a shot at me? And give me a bit more of a warning next time? _[Threat # 134 Origin Enquiry. Program: 'Injury Prevention' - chain to program: 'Search- Neutralize-Destroy']_

Zero didn't run the programs. It informed Quatre, as huffily as a spell in the shape of an algorithm could, that the shot had been random: a wild arrow loosed from a bow at the moment one of Trowa's bolts had caught the shooter in the chest. Zero was good, but it couldn't quite predict the unpredictable. Randomness could be tamed by the suitable application of chaos theory, but not without time for the computations, more information and-

Some help you are. Just... give it a rest, Quatre thought tiredly. _[Program: 'Search-Neutralize-Destroy' - Aborted. Purge cache.]_

Zero went back to trying to predict the end of the universe, Juusan's defeat, and how to get them out of their present predicament. Quatre had long ago stopped trying to realign Zero's priorities, it was more trouble than it was worth. As long as their survival and victory over the Scourge was in there somewhere...

One of their attackers took Trowa's next bolt in the stomach. It fell to the ground, yipping like a wounded coyote. The remaining archers bayed. Quatre poked his head cautiously around a clump of rocks.

Howard had dropped them off at the edge of the jungle, near the equator, halfway around the world from Svale's sanctuary. He would have flown them to the Anima source directly, but the canopy was too dense for a landing. Not that he could have safely taken them anywhere near the jungle, as it turned out; some source or other within the green ocean started disrupting the navigation computer on his spaceship almost a mile away. Howard was a techno-cabalist used to the vagaries of Center, its massive interference with anything technological, its almost playful power surges and drains that made most complex machines hard to rely on, or liable to blow up in your face. His ship had wards placed over all the sensitive elements, and techno-cabalist mandalas on the hull. Howard had flown that ship through the savage, chaotic Mater region without a hitch. But the disruption to the Sources' boundaries caused by the planetary shield defeated even the cunning old man's usual precautions. He'd had to ditch his passengers at the edge of the jungle and return to orbit, where he waited for their signal to come and pick them up again.

Quatre had sensed something wrong as soon as they walked into the thick brush. Patterns of mystical energy lay all around them like tripwires. Trowa had seen them too; this was his element, after all. He led the small party through the dense vegetation stifling with raw life force, and tried not to disturb anything. They'd walked for over an hour, and had nearly reached the Anima source, when they realized that something was coming for them, trying to surround them in the dense woods. Trowa had led the party at a run towards a rocky outcropping that pierced the canopy a few hundred yards from their path. They had managed to clamber up the steep side of the promontory and take refuge among its rocks before their pursuers could catch up with them. They had a clear shot at their attackers, while being able to protect themselves somewhat. If they'd been caught out in the jungle, they'd have been submerged.

The creatures barked and yowled at the shores where the sea of trees broke against the island of rock. Quatre, with his Zero-enhanced vision, could see the lines moving the creatures. They were artificial, even a cursory observation revealed their attackers to be too identical, too predictable, with none of the flashes of originality, of true genius or utter stupidity that living creatures were always endowed with. These were products of a Source; even Trowa didn't know which one, or which god or legend they represented.

They looked a lot like hyenas or some other scavenging jackal, fur and jaws and tufted crests and everything. But they ran on two feet, albeit hunched over to make do with an animal’s joints, and their paws seemed remarkably adept at shooting arrows from small wickedly curved bows. They each had leather belts and quivers around their waists, with absolutely no indication of how they could have made them or even cinched them on without opposable thumbs. Sources didn’t sweat the details all that much...

"Are you all right, my young friend?"

Quatre, lost in visions of the future and strategies for the present, merely nodded distractedly at S. The warden looked at him anxiously, until Quatre, trying to avoid a conversation that would only distract him at this point, crawled away to rejoin Trowa.

S followed him. The warden had arrived at the Sanctuary a day after G, and he'd opted to come with them, to help them gain the stone from the Anima source and lead them through the jungle. The elderly shaman was armed with a staff, but at this point he wasn't very useful. Trowa was keeping the attackers at bay on one side of the plateau they were on, and Fen's whip was keeping them at a respectful distance on the other. Quatre couldn't see Fen; a further outcrop of shrub-ridden rock blocked the Phoenix from their view. But from the way their enemy moved, and the lines of the future, he knew Fen was still standing steadily against the attackers, who seemed terrified of Epyon.

They were holding their enemy off, but that wasn't enough. Sooner or later, Trowa would run out of bolts, and Fen... well, Fen would probably be okay, but... there was a series of nasty little equations called 'Fen - Motivations' running at the back of Quatre's mind, and he wasn't liking some of the results they occasionally threw up. No, they had to-

_[Pattern disruption of enemy movement - 89%]_

\- had to find a way to... to force the issue...

_[Speculate as to cause: enemy has adopted new strategy: 67% - covering for loss of team-mates: 23% - start of a retreat: 4.6% - other causes fall below probability threshold. Concentrating on most likely cause: enemy has adopted new strategy. Calculate and counter new strategy. Program: 'Tree of Probability']_

From the basic premise, various futures unfolded like branches before Quatre's eyes. At the tip of each blossomed a simple number: the chances of the success of the mission. The priorities of which were, to have as many of them reach the Anima source as possible, while maximizing the chances of survival of Zero's carrier.

"I'm worried about Fen."

Quatre was already acting on the branch leading to the best choice before he had time to think. Thinking dropped their survival numbers considerably.

"I should go see if he's okay." Quatre started to stand up.

"No, stay here!" Trowa hissed.

"I'll go," S offered.

Quatre promptly sat down, and heard his own voice add: "If you go around that side of that heap of rocks, you should be protected from projectiles from below."

"Good idea, young man. I'll make the cry of the screech owl if we're in trouble, Trowa."

Trowa grunted as he loosed a bolt at an imprudent jackal. It turned tail and crawled away, yipping, with an arrow in its thigh.

Quatre stared blindly at the air where Zero was drawing its patterns, and counted the seconds in his head, his mind still focused on a stratagem he was more feeling than plotting. He wasn't entirely sure what he was counting down to - then S suddenly cried out in alarm behind them, and he knew.

Zero had been right: their attackers had switched tactics. The jackals had left only a few of their remaining numbers to pin down the defenders and had been circling the base of the outcropping out of sight, looking for the best way up to attack. They had the intelligence of animals, unable to truly plan a concerted charge; Zero had deduced this from their strategy to date. S's movements along the promontory had drawn them instinctively, like a pack of wolves after a singled-out deer. They'd found a way up in the part where his path to Fen dipped the lowest, and they were now boiling up the slope towards him, clambering up the rocks and bushes of a gulley whose walls protected them from Trowa and Fen.

Quatre heard Trowa gasp and start to rise behind him-

"S. Duck."

Fortunately, S obeyed the healer's command instantly.

The mage-bolt passed over the warden and hit the rocky face opposite the gulley the hyena-jackals were climbing, at the precise spot Zero dictated. The rock cracked and split, and a huge boulder detached itself and crunched down into the ravine.

Quatre whipped his hand back without even looking - a wall of force shot up between the standing Trowa and the arrow headed for the shaman’s heart.

The movement had been instinctive. The healer glanced back to take stock. Trowa was standing. A shattered arrow hovered near his chest, caught in Quatre's hasty force field. But Trowa's left arm was raised, and the protective wrist guard was poised to intercept the arrow that had never reached it.

"I can read lines too." Trowa's voice was dull. He sounded numb. He was staring over Quatre's head where, the healer knew without looking, S had used his staff to finish off the two jackals who hadn't been caught by the boulder.

"The last six creatures will charge any time now. They do not understand defeat," the healer informed him. He was ready to bet Trowa had figured out that Quatre had used S as bait, and that couldn't be good, but victory was still a few crucial steps away and that took priority. "Be ready."

Trowa knelt, crossbow swinging towards the targets that would soon be visible. His movements were slow and steady, but his eyes looked as blind as if he'd had the time to invoke the Sight and bind them with his headband.

"He's a warden, Trowa," Quatre said reasonably, since they still had forty to fifty seconds before the final charge. "He's pretty much unkillable." And S wasn't doing much good here, with just a staff against an opponent who was out of reach.

Trowa was silent.

"If I'd asked him to do it, he would have gone," Quatre added. "I just didn't have the time. They'd have found another way up in a minute, another path where I couldn't have-"

"Don't." The word was soft, almost covered by the thunk of the crossbow releasing its next bolt.

Thoughts hammered at Quatre’s concentration. ‘Don’t’, huh? So, you don't want to listen to reason? You would prefer that I stand back and let you, or Fen or S, die? Is that better than being useful?

_[Analysis[Trowa] = Affirmative]_

Quatre shot a furious 'purge' command at Zero's cold calculation, and was ignored. Zero knew its priorities. A little equation it had been working on for a while now, even though Quatre repeatedly asked it not to, found a few more parameters added to it. Zero was programmed to defend its owner against harm and to give Quatre as much control over the outcome of the future and its battles as possible. And Trowa, the spell had long ago judged, was a serious impediment to Quatre's efficiency and control.

I care too much about what he thinks. And what he thinks... is that I should stay his gentle, defenseless healer. He wants to keep control of me. Keep me safe - and all but useless - by his side. Those thoughts belonged to Quatre, but they were born from a part of his mind that he'd cauterized from his emotions, with Zero's help, to give him some objectivity and distance from the strategies he had to implement. It wasn't quite the 'Stone Rose' program, which would jettison all emotional connections, but it was close. Quatre's emotional being tried to object to those thoughts about Trowa, but it wasn't a logical entity, and it was having a hard time opposing Zero's cold and measured conclusions, particularly when the level, less emotional Quatre was reluctantly drawing the same ones.

The last jackal died five feet away from their improvised shelter. Quatre had had a mage-bolt ready, but he'd held off using it when it was obvious Trowa could deal with the creature before it reached them. Maybe this show of helplessness, of letting Trowa defend him, would stabilize their relation once more, and put off for a bit longer the inevitable confrontation and break-up which was clearly ahead. The break-up which would leave him free of all emotional ties, free to take up 'Stone Rose', the program that would allow him to focus only on the future and no other weaknesses. 

He was in no hurry for that to happen. He held on to the pain he felt like a lifeline, as Trowa stood up slowly and looked at him like he was a stranger.

"All safe on this side, I see."

Fen came striding across the path, glancing indifferently at the mess at the bottom of the gulley as he passed. It had been his choice to defend their position by himself. In a spot where, if his companions had all been killed, Fen could have stood with his back against a cliff and defended himself alone just as well. Quatre thought he knew the basis of that decision and he didn't like a lot of the conclusions Zero was drawing about Fen. That was one of the reasons Quatre had insisted on coming with the group, though Trowa had been rather reluctant to include him.

The other reason Quatre would not be left behind was the stone they were going to fetch. It was one of the key parameters to defeating Juusan, and Zero would not be anything less than involved in securing it.

And he also wanted to make sure Trowa was safe; Quatre found he had to add this to the list of the mission parameters, again. Zero tended to drop that one if the healer wasn't paying attention.

There was some resistance from the spell. Equations and lines flashed in Quatre's mind. Trowa's survival would not play a role in Juusan's defeat; the shaman did not have the power to oppose the Scourge, and Quatre's ability to read lines was now superior to his lover's. And there was that other equation... 'Emotional Chains', Zero had lyrically dubbed it. Bastard spell.

"Let's go to the Anima source," Quatre said quickly as S rejoined them. "The Source that produced these jackal-creatures can generate more."

"Agreed." Fen strode smoothly down the slope, forcing the others to follow. "Assuming, of course, it wasn't the Anima source that spawned them in the first place."

"No," Trowa and S said simultaneously.

"The Anima source would have sent... something else," Trowa added.

"She's not like that, anyway," S concluded with a small smile. "'A leopard doesn't change its spots'."

The old warden had apparently not suffered any harm, if he was back to spouting his proverbs and homilies, Quatre concluded dryly. He didn't say it out loud. He doubted it would do anything to remove the dull, inward look in Trowa's eyes.

Quatre wondered how long he'd be able to put off the inevitable. And why he wanted to put it off, the colder, more analytical part of him murmured. He was tired of being in pain, tired of being divided in himself, tired of this schism between feelings and logic. Tired of seeing the pain in Trowa's eyes, too. It would be so much easier... better all around...

No. Something was holding him back, telling him to wait. It was the part that wasn't logical, and Zero wanted to eliminate it. It was dangerous to have something uncontrollable like that within his very heart. But if that part of him wasn't logical, it was alive, compassionate and intuitive, still valuable even if Zero couldn't understand that, and Quatre clung to it stubbornly. He had the unexplainable feeling that he should not shed it unless he really had no other choice.

Let the lines play out to the end. If their separation was inevitable, then there was no need to rush it either. He'd take the pain, as well as the pleasure that simply being with his lover still brought him, while he could still feel something.

\--- 

"I'll wait for you outside," Fen announced abruptly, after one look at the source they were about to enter.

"What's the point?" Quatre countered promptly, before either of the others could say anything. "With the Source's boundaries eroded, she can harm you out here just as easily as in there."

"She's unwilling to leave the source, you can see that as clearly as I can," Fen shot back, eyes narrowing. Quatre felt the brush of Fen's thought-lines against his, as the Phoenix tried to figure out why the healer had said that. But Fen was using Zero to keep himself more or less operational, and that removed a lot of its analytical abilities. Quatre and his strategies were beyond the Phoenix's grasp now.

"She's unwilling, but that doesn't mean she won't," Quatre replied, tweaking the threads of the future; like teasing a trout nibbling on a baited line. "Come with us. An extra pair of eyes and ears to judge the situation and stop it from going sour can't hurt."

"I'll stay here." Fen crossed his arms and leaned against a fallen tree, caught nearly upright in the dense tangle of jungle around them.

The healer already had his next argument ready; he'd had it prepared before this conversation had even started. He wouldn't miss the opportunity of observing Fen in a more dangerous situation than the jackal's ambush.

"Those creatures might attack again," he pointed out, eminently logical. "But Anima will keep them out of her Source. You'll be safer with us."

Fen glanced around him at the jungle teaming with life, then he glared like a sphinx at the shorter healer, and shoved away from the tree. He followed them, but he hung back, visibly unwilling to join them entirely.

"I guess I can't blame him," S sighed softly as they crossed into the source. "He's been manipulated into joining us and helping us. Why should he take any risk?"

That had little or nothing to do with it, Quatre had already concluded quite some time ago, but he didn't bother to correct the old man's assumptions. How... how could he get to the bottom of Fen's psychology? His motivations? Zero required data. Fen was a dubious ally, it was important to judge how he would react to any given situation, preferably before the chips went down. And if that wasn't reason enough, Fen's behavior was part of a much greater equation, one linked directly to Juusan and to Center’s survival...

S cleared his throat. He was walking between Trowa and Quatre, and apparently the silence was growing oppressive.

"I see she hasn't changed," he murmured, visibly uncomfortable. "Still very fond of rats."

That she was. Quatre glanced around indifferently at the rustling underbrush. There had been a lot of scurrying and squeaking around them, but it hadn't been clear what was causing it to start with. Then he'd spotted a few of the creatures, climbing up and down vines like the rigging on a sailing ship and impudently observing the intruders from tree branches. Dozens of beady eyes, small and black like shiny drops of basalt, glittered from the dense jungle brush.

These creatures were not real, they were generated by the magic of the Source. It was throbbing all around them, a primal life force, an animal mind. Trowa hadn't had much time to give them details about the Anima source, but he had mentioned it had strong affinities to shamanism.

The Source was huge; they'd been walking ten minutes, and Quatre gathered from the strands of power echoing around him that they were nowhere near the center yet. Then the path, what there was of it, trickled to a stop in a small clearing around a pool. A couple of deer were drinking there. They lifted their heads to stare at the new arrivals, then went back to drinking, completely unafraid. In fact, there was the distinct feeling in the air that if anybody should be afraid here, it was the intruders. There were tracks in the underbrush, leading away. Fen stomped to the center of the clearing, where he could have a clear view of anything approaching him, and glared at the deer. S went off to examine one of the paths more closely. Trowa hooked a hand under Quatre's arm and dragged him off to one side. The healer's heart froze in surprise, and then sank. What, here? Now? So soon?

"Quatre-"

"S is a warden. Besides being well-nigh invulnerable, he wouldn't hesitate to risk his life for our mission to protect Center."

Trowa paused, eyes narrowing beneath the cascade of hair. Quatre silently cursed himself. He'd jumped the gun under the effect of a sudden surge of panic, his vision almost completely obscured by the parameters of the event that Zero was predicting. But from the look on Trowa's face, that hadn't been what he had wanted to talk about at all.

Trowa visibly refocused on the issue, dropping the other, unknown subject. "That is true. But you could have explained-"

"I didn't have the time."

"You could have described the situation in ten words, the time it took you to trick him into going." Trowa's voice was oddly neutral. It wasn't his wont to rant and carry on, of course, but he rarely shut himself off so thoroughly from his lover. It's starting, a small part of Quatre thought sadly.

"I could have explained. And then he'd have argued, or asked me how I knew. Or accused me of being delusional."

Quatre had used that last word like one chambered a bullet and cocked a hammer. Trowa had been visibly preparing a retort; that last word caused him to flinch, his mouth clicking shut on anything he might have said. They'd had a talk with Howard when they were aboard his ship. The technologist hadn't waited for Quatre to confront him. He'd approached them both and apologized, admitting his involvement with Shinigami. Up until then, Trowa had continued to believe that Quatre had confronted Howard weeks ago due to paranoia and hallucinations. 

"I would have had the time to explain, barely. I did not have the time to convince," Quatre finished composedly, his words falling neatly into the waiting silence.

He waited as Trowa licked his lips and tried to regain his mental footing.

"He would have gone without convincing," Trowa objected, his voice soft and without fire.

"So you say. You know him. I don't." Quatre hated the way his voice was so implacably logical, but then, how else was he supposed to say it?

And why was Zero suddenly diverting so much energy to its tactics program and jumping to battle-stations? Trowa wasn't going to fight him. Quatre crossed his arms over his chest to avoid rubbing his forehead. He wanted to concentrate, wanted to explain, he wanted Trowa to understand -

_[Warning! Warning! War- Comprehension of others not necessary for-]_

Shut up! He wanted- and Zero was distracting him. What-

"Quatre-" Trowa interrupted himself and closed his eyes briefly. "We'll talk about this after the mission. We'll be seeing Anima soon. Look, there's something I have to tell you-"

"Trowa."

Quatre really wanted to hear what Trowa was going to say - he had the feeling his lover had been trying to tell him something about Anima several times already, at the Sanctuary, aboard Howard's ship, but each time they'd been interrupted, S and Fen popping up with questions, plans - whatever Trowa wanted to say, it was important to him, though not important enough to say in front of the others... or did he not trust S and Fen? Either way, Quatre was very curious to know what it was that Trowa wanted to say, and how it would impact the lines of the future, but at this point, he couldn't concentrate on that. At all.

"- it won't stop us from getting the -"

"Trowa. Hush."

The shaman looked at him questioningly, then stiffened as he felt the lines that had already alarmed Quatre, closing in on them.

Quatre slowly uncrossed his arms, his hands gathering power for a mage bolt. "Don't make any sudden moves, but there's a rat the size of a rottweiler right behind you."

It had materialized out of the jungle just a few seconds ago, and it was sitting there so relaxed and confident that Quatre had almost overlooked it as part of the scenery, if Zero hadn't drawn his attention to it with several alarms.

"Don't attack it." Trowa's voice was as soft as Quatre's, but it held a definite warning. He turned slowly. The rat sat back on its haunches and looked at him appraisingly, in a manner that was too intelligent for any beast.

"Greetings. We wish to speak to Anima. Could you lead us to her?" Trowa asked politely. His hands were empty and away from his weapons. Quatre heard/felt/analyzed the rustling of leaves, the crackling of twigs around them, and let his own hands drop slowly. The rodent wasn't alone.

The rat stared at them, motionless, only its whiskers were vibrating slightly. Then its tail curled up around its naked feet and long yellow toes, its ears twitched. It seemed to be considering. And then it was gone. Quatre blinked. It had moved with such speed that even his Zero-assisted senses hadn't followed it.

Zero obligingly upped the level of the danger they were all in; it judged that if all the rats around them could move at such speeds, none of their small party, not even Fen, could counter the attack. The spell didn't trust Trowa's judgment about this thing's peaceful intentions. And what had Trowa been about to say? What did he know about Anima that he hadn't shared while planning the mission on Howard's ship? There was an unknown variable there. If it wasn't for the mission, and the presence of a powerful entity within the Source, Zero would have insisted that Quatre lay waste to the entire clearing with one flare, and get the hell out of there immediately.

"How interesting is it dangerous?" Fen asked, both the scholar and the warrior trying to get a word in at once. Fen was hard to talk to under stress, you had the impression you were listening to two or three different conversations at the same time.

"Ah, she's found us, I see." S had rejoined them too, and confidently took a few steps after the rat, which was waiting for them a bit further down along one of the tracks. "Have no fear. The guides will lead us to her. Don't step on their tails, though. That gets them very upset."

"I'll do my best," Fen muttered.

Quatre glanced at Trowa, then at the rapidly disappearing backs of his friends. "Let's-"

"Quatre-"

"Let's not lose them. Come on." Quatre lengthened his stride.

"If you ever have to sacrifice me for the greater good, do me the favor of telling me why I'm about to die. You won't have to convince me."

"Very well."

The words were neutral, because there were too many different emotions that could have colored them otherwise - pain, love, resentment, sorrow, anger, trust, despair... he no longer knew anymore. That part of himself couldn't be unknotted with all of Zero's logic, and he wasn't sure he even wanted to. It had been the dispassionate side of Quatre which had spoken the actual words. That part also loved Trowa, strangely enough; it was simply not hampered or blinded by the emotion. That Quatre had already resolved that, if it was required, he would do his lover that one grace. He would trust him, and tell him why his sacrifice was necessary.

\---

Next Chapter: The Source of Death and Life

Rats, Roaches and a Goddess, oh my!


	37. The Source of Death and Life

"Are you alright?" Trowa asked softly.

Quatre wasn't surprised at the question; he knew his eyes were flicking around so fast, it probably looked like he was having seizures. "I've been better. Too many vectors, too many possibilities." Too many potential enemies.

A multitude of rats squirmed and skittered all around the clearing they'd been led to, making the clumps of long grass shiver. Zero had even abandoned its calculations about the end of the universe to try to elaborate a survival strategy in case the creatures turned on them. So far, the only thing it had come up with was ‘run like hell and hope they eat the others first'. And even then, it didn't like Quatre's chances. Zero was giving him merry hell for walking into a situation where he had so little control.

"I... I meant, are all these rats making you nervous? You hate them."

Quatre stared at Trowa blankly, then glanced at a nearby gaggle of rodents who gazed back at him curiously, noses twitching. "As a healer, I abhor them. They carry disease, as well as lice and fleas. But these rats have never seen a sewer, I'm sure. Besides," Quatre muttered, nodding minutely towards a rat as big as a pony near the throne, "getting ticks or catching the plague is the least of our worries at this juncture. A phobia is illogical in that light."

"How about you?" S asked, glancing back at Fen. "Getting the heeby-jeebies?"

Fen was hanging back again; his own Zero had probably elaborated the same survival tactic as Quatre's, and he was getting ready to use a head start if he needed it. He stared at S as if the man had spoken another language. "They're simply small mammals. They've not hurt me yet. At this point, I find them less repulsive than humans."

Zero was busy giving itself and Quatre a headache, but it took time to note that little nugget of information down for later analysis.

" ...Okay." S turned around with a 'no offense meant' hand gesture, then he rubbed the metallic patch that covered his scarred and ruined nose. "Well, make sure you both keep that enlightened attitude. She hates it when someone disses the rats. ‘Your host is never wrong and always has the best of tastes while you are under his roof'."

"Or in her jungle, surrounded by her pets," Trowa murmured.

The clearing they crossed was alive, for want of a better word. Seagulls hung around a watering hole, and pigeons and crows flew between the shrubs and bushes. A few deer nuzzled the bark of a small grove of aspen, and an old bison was ruminating off to one side. The grass of the huge clearing crawled with rabbits, ground squirrels, cockroaches the size of matchboxes and, of course, rats.

The throne was at the center of all this life. That is to say, it felt like a throne, though on the face of it, it was a mere broken and rotten tree stump. Bugs crawled over the carpet of moss that covered it like a cloak of ermine. They did not seem out of place; they were part of life, slowly returning the old tree to the earth that had birthed it. Toadstools sprouted like ornaments up and down the sides of the broken stump. Banners of vines trailed from the two tall trees standing sentinel by its side. Beneath them stood the particularly big rats that Quatre had been eyeing from the start. A phobia was an irrational fear of something. He considered that being wary of these monstrous rodents was in fact quite reasonable indeed.

The woman sat on the throne with the dignity of a queen, despite her near nudity. She had twists of vines around her slender limbs, like gilded armbands and anklets. Small pebbles dangled from them, pierced and carved by water and time, as elegant as jewels against her sun-browned skin. Her sarong was woven out of grass, decorated with a simple geometrical design in ocher. A necklace of nuts and dried berries hung around her neck. She had one hand in her lap, holding a small vole, and her other hand rested on the head of a fox, one of the few carnivores Quatre could see in the clearing. Not that any of this obeyed any laws of ecology anybody had ever heard of; this was a Source, and it blithely ignored such rules the same way the fox ignored the rats and plump mice scampering near its paws. It was getting its ears scratched by its mistress, its eyes slitted in satisfaction. Quatre was still a healer, despite everything, and a tiny part of him shuddered at the thought of lice. A glance at Anima's cool blue eyes as they neared the throne prompted Quatre to use one of Zero's mind-modification tools -  
_Program 'Switch-off' - Target [disease neurosis]_  
\- to get rid of that strand of thought. This was a Goddess, a representative of a Source. She might not have the power to read minds, but he wasn't about to bet his life and their mission on it. And talking of missions... he glanced around discreetly, but he couldn't see a stone that corresponded to the power source they were looking for. Damn. They'd have to play nice.

"Trowa."

Quatre glanced up in surprise, and it took a lot to surprise him these days. Her voice had been rich, deep for a woman of her small stature. And she knew Trowa's name. Trowa had said he'd been here before, but that was a far cry from being on first-name basis with divinity.

"Anima Mundi." Trowa bowed from the waist.

Anima looked appraisingly at Trowa. A couple of rats skittered over the shaman's boots, and one stopped and put a paw on his leg, staring up at him too. Quatre managed to stop a twitch from escaping. Maybe he should have allowed 'Switch-off' to be a bit more aggressive at rooting out such reactions from him.

"You have changed. You are older. Has it been that long, shaman?" Anima's whisper seemed to brush through the clearing, it was carried by the buzz of insects, the skitter of rats, the warm hum of sunshine warming the plants. It was plainly audible, through skin and bones as well as ears.

"Yes. In the world outside your source, several decades have passed." Trowa raised his head slowly and looked at her without fear. S was doing the same. Apparently, this Goddess did not demand obeisance.

Anima was silent for awhile. The chirp of grasshoppers, the scuttle of bugs and the cheep of rodents seemed to intensify.

"I am glad to see you again," the Goddess finally said. "Before the end."

Now, that's what you call a loaded remark, Quatre thought weakly. Those three words shoved Zero down a whole new avenue of calculations. The spell shelved a lot of the battle strategies it was elaborating for the present, since Anima did not seem to be hostile. Instead, it picked up the threads of the equation that was Juusan. Quatre forgot about the clearing and its scruffy and possibly disease-ridden inhabitants, and concentrated entirely on the Goddess's next words.

"You know about Juusan's arrival?" Trowa asked, tripping slightly over the length of the -uu-.

Slowly Anima nodded. "That. And more."

"The Source of All Things."

Quatre blurted the words out as Zero suddenly made one of its lightning connections in his mind.

The Source of All Things. The words, heard during Duo's visions of the past, had slashed through his mind like trails of fire, setting off explosions of equations, tremors of patterns breaking and reshaping... The way Anima's eyes had fastened on him, and the powerful lines that moved her, were giving Zero new elements to place into its overall view of the future, though even the spell was still at a loss to see how it all fit together.

The vole in Anima's hand suddenly started up in a flurry of claws and fur and shot off her lap, and the fox slunk away behind the throne, its ears twitching back against its skull. Anima stood up and took a step forward, or at least Quatre supposed she did from the sound of her foot on the leaf mulch lying like a tasselled golden carpet before the throne. He didn't actually see her move because Trowa was suddenly in front of him, blocking the view.

Quatre prudently glanced over Trowa's shoulder. Anima was still walking towards them. She was smaller than he was, he realized now that he saw her standing; the top of her head would barely reach his chin. Her figure was slender, her bare breasts small. Her hair was the color of pine polished by water and sunshine. Quatre glanced at her two big furry guardians, but they didn't seem particularly upset.  
"Anima... " Trowa spoke softly, beseechingly.

Quatre finally reacted. Zero had been crowding his mind with strategies and equations, and he was only just realizing that his lover had placed himself between Quatre and a potentially pissed-off Goddess who might want retribution for something that he, Quatre, had imprudently blurted out. He tried to slip around Trowa, but the shaman's arm shot out and held him back.

"You know much." Anima sounded much older than before, and so much older than she looked. Her eyes and movements were not particularly hostile; Trowa began to relax. Zero did a quick reading of the spread of the future, and foresaw little immediate danger. Except the danger of getting so much information that Quatre's brain might explode, the healer amended sarcastically. Zero flourished more word, suggestions of avenues to explore, to exploit this source of wisdom regardless of that and other risks.

"I know that Juusan is- Trowa, let me - " He grabbed his lover's hand and hauled it to his side. Trowa said nothing, though the fingers that clenched Quatre's were still taut with concern. "I know Juusan is the thirteenth aspect of the Source of All Things, at least that's what the Jishin called him. I'm not sure what that means. I know that the Source Of All Things and Juusan are somehow connected to the Sources. And you're-... " how to put this politely, and, above all, non-atheistically, since lighting bolts were hard to dodge this close up. "I know you're a wise and powerful Goddess who inhabits a particularly potent Source," Quatre finished diplomatically.

"Then you do not know enough." Anima shook her head gently. "If you did, then you would not ask me for what you are about to ask me."

The members of the party glanced at each other, puzzled.

"We came to borrow the power to which you are guardian, dark one," Trowa said firmly, after a glance at Quatre.

"I know what you are here for, Trowa."

"It's born from the life-force of the Earth. It will return to you eventually. You don't need it yet, not until the end of times." Trowa was speaking quickly. S had drawn near as well, as if ready to support his one-time pupil. Fen had taken several steps back and was looking at them as if he wanted little to do with them and whatever trouble they'd gotten themselves into. "If we do not have it, then Juusan will destroy all life on Center. Including the plants and animals."

"Yes," Anima said simply.

"Yes, you'll give it to us?" S asked, as if not quite daring to believe it would be that easy.

Anima glanced at him. She was silent for a spell.

"Yes, I will give it to you, Trowa, if you ask me. You walk tall in the patterns of the dream-earth. You see far. You care. Your soul is one of the golden ones that always return to Center, to me. I knew this when I accepted you as my lover, all those decades ago."

Quatre felt more than saw Trowa's quick glance sideways at the healer. Oh. Oh, so that was why Trowa hadn't wanted Quatre to come, and had tried to talk to him before they stumbled upon Anima. It took Quatre a few seconds to figure out why. Long ago - not that long ago, actually, only a few months - he was still an uncertain recently-cloistered twenty-one-year-old healer with a head full of rigid dogma, no experience of the world, and a lover who was much older, well-traveled, and very experienced indeed. They'd run into some of Trowa's former lovers during their voyages; the shaman didn't quite have one in every town, but he had a few in every country. They were all older than Quatre; self-assured, sensual and mature. They'd accepted Trowa's nature and had merely enjoyed his company and his bed without ever looking for more. They'd invariably left the young healer feeling callow, prudish and rather inadequate, whatever Trowa said or did to reassure him.

Yes, it seemed like a long time ago now. Quatre wondered how he'd have reacted to this particular situation back then, and he couldn't even guess. He probably would have been as intimidated and threatened as Trowa apparently feared he would.

It saddened him that Trowa still thought it would bother him now.

It saddened him a bit that it didn't.

He shook himself. Think about it later. If ever. It really wasn't that important. And Anima, after a moment of contemplation, looked ready to speak again. Since apparently the Goddess had never mastered the art of small talk, or didn't know how to end a sentence without dropping a bombshell, Quatre had to pay attention to her every word; he didn't need Zero to remind him that a lot more than his feelings were at stake here.

"I will give you my charge, Trowa," Anima finally said, her voice as soft as the humming of flies in the sunlit clearing. "But be careful what you ask for. You see far ahead, shaman. But like most humans, you do not see far enough."

I'm sure she's actually enjoying being this obscure, Quatre thought with an inward groan as Zero pounced on the cryptic sentence and started ripping it apart for all its possible meaning.

"Juusan will destroy Center," Trowa answered, uncertain. "I don't see what else can-"

"But life will return. It always does. Even if he burns the land to barren rock and boils the seas dry, in time the rock will fritter to soil, the seas will fall as rain, and life will rise once again. The wheel keeps turning. But for you-"

Anima reached out slowly, and brushed the bangs away from Trowa's face in a gentle gesture that was familiar and intimate, as if he'd only left her side yesterday.

"Oh Trowa. If you knew. If you saw a bit further. The Thirteenth is only the beginning."

Her words echoed in Quatre's mind. Zero was howling in frustration. It had gaps in its knowledge, holes in its data. It was touching something, it was a few unknown variables away from solving a puzzle it had first glimpsed in the Jishin chamber of memories. And it was somehow connected to the equations that had predicted the end of the universe in ten billion years. It all hung together, and despite the ten billion years business, it was, in fact all terribly immediate and Zero was getting more and more frantic to solve it - and it couldn't find the required information to do so! Quatre was dimly aware that he was hanging on to Trowa's hand to avoid falling, but he could do nothing but listen to the Goddess's measured words.

"You are part of a pattern of greater destruction than any Juusan can bring. In fact-... but I can say no more." Zero did the mental equivalent of a full-throated scream of frustration at that. "The wheel turns. For the children of Men, it will stop turning very soon. And then I will be alone, with only my animals, for the rest of the time allotted. I should want this. Humans are destructive, even as their dreams are seductive. But... " the hand reached up again, and this time she caressed Trowa's cheek. "But despite all this, I would not see the race of Men disappear. I cannot help but wish for your failure, Trowa."

"Wish for my-... but Juusan will destroy everybody living on the planet. You should wish for my success."

There was silence for a few heartbeats.

"You weren't just talking about the people living on Center, were you," S stated flatly. His eyes were wide, staring blindly at the throne behind Anima. "You're talking about humans everywhere."

The clearing, which had gone a bit quiet, seemed to shiver with the simple, ominous words. The sunshine felt weak on Quatre's skin.

Anima said nothing. Something had closed off behind her eyes. Quatre had the strange feeling that there was less of her here than there was before. He realized with sick finality that she would probably not say anything else on the subject.

"If Juusan re-sources himself, I think it's fair to say that most humans will be in considerable trouble," S murmured, trying to tease a reaction out of the Goddess. "Is there something worse that could happen, just because we kick this guy's ass?"

Anima was silent. She didn't appear to be listening. The hand returned to linger on Trowa's chest and a tiny portion of Quatre still managed to feel rather annoyed at that.

Trowa slowly shook his head. "If you cannot tell us more, Anima, then we have to work with what we know. If Juusan destroys Center, the repercussions on the arcane plane will condemn humans to another Dark Age. We might even go back to the galaxy-wide isolation of the Scattering. Even the techno-cabalists would be hard put to rip Ether with their machines if we lose the mystical knowledge on how to navigate it."

"But men, like life, would rise again." It was barely a whisper. Quatre didn't see her lips move. The words were not sad. He had a sudden feeling of what Anima represented as a Source. Nature, and the strength and inevitability of life in any form. She surrounded herself with rats and cockroaches because they were the most vigorous and omnipresent of her children. She didn't care for pretty, she didn't care for kind. She saw the wheel turn for many species, and others rise to take their place. She saw further than any mortal could, the wheel turned in her eyes, on and on, forever. Even if it did stop, once and for all, for Mankind, Anima would not regret it. She would wait around and see what next sentience the galaxy might produce, if any.

"That might be so. But I cannot make that kind of choice for so many people," Trowa answered simply. "I can only defend what is in my power to defend. Center is my home, my mother. I will protect her, and all the animals that live here, and all the people who dream along with her and tell her story. It's the only choice I can make."

Anima nodded slowly, with neither surprise nor regret. Then she held out her hand, palm up. A bird started chirping loudly and excitedly in the branches nearby, as if it had just figured out that this might attract females. A rat the size of a poodle glanced curiously up at Quatre, then rubbed itself against Anima's bare legs.

There was something shaping above Anima's palm. It was small and black. Quatre saw that much before he had to close his eyes and mind. The lines around it... they held all the power, the greatness and the raw cruelty of nature. It was shaped from the inevitable end of the small, woodland creature at the teeth of predators. It reeked of illness and death. It held the end of entire species in its darkness, the end of mankind, and it didn't even care enough about them to notice. It was the antithesis of the bright sunshine and the clearing full of life. And yet it also belonged here.

Then the terrible lines warped and folded in onto themselves, and vanished. Anima was holding a black rock, shining like basalt, in the shape of a pyramid. It fit comfortably into her small palm. It looked very innocuous. Quatre could now examine it without feeling his eyeballs being ripped from their sockets, much to his relief. He could still feel the potential there, though. It lay in the facets of the object, quiescent, like a tree held in its seed, dormant until needed. Quatre hoped Duo and Svale would know how to use it in the sanctuary. He doubted the thing came with an instruction manual.

Trowa slowly reached out, and Anima tipped the small stone into his palm, steadying his hand with hers. Then she folded his fingers over the stone, and caressed them.

"Now you have what you came for. The wheel turns. Will you stay with me tonight, Trowa? I fear that I might not know many more bright, animal spirits like yours."

Zero started to compute the probability of Trowa getting more information out of Anima while - yeah, well, good plan, but no, not if I have anything to do with it, Quatre interjected. Zero came pretty close to whining, but Quatre ignored it.

Trowa smiled gently at the small Goddess in obvious friendship and gratitude. "I'm afraid that I cannot, dark one."

Anima didn't appear put out. She merely glanced at Quatre with her beyond-old eyes, and smiled ever so slightly. "I understand. You are fortunate."

"Yes," Trowa answered without any hesitation or undercurrent in his answer. Zero was momentarily puzzled by this; it went against most of its calculations regarding Trowa's attitude at this time. Then it formulated a theory that the shaman might be hoping to hold his relationship with Quatre together by sheer denial. It ran that equation against the patterns of probability and was satisfied with it. Quatre had noted the discrepancy between Zero's predictions and reality, and quietly stored it away in the part of himself that felt the same way as Trowa; the part he refused to get rid of, despite Zero's persuasive and eminently logical arguments.

"Maybe you could both stay?" S suggested artlessly. He tossed that out innocently enough, but Zero had spotted the curl of a tentative thread of control in the way the old shaman had glanced at Anima. Apparently, S was just as hopeful as Zero was that the pair could get more information out of the Goddess.

Trowa turned slowly and gave his mentor an uncharacteristically irritated glare. Quatre's lips quirked. He had an itch to say something like 'good idea', just to see the look on Trowa's face. But now that he was thinking about it, instead of merely reacting, he had to admit it wasn't exactly the worst of plans. He'd told Trowa not half an hour ago that he was willing to sacrifice them both for the greater good; this was a lot less dramatic and would be over in the morning. He was no longer the timid youth he'd been. And he trusted both Trowa and himself not to become emotionally entangled with the product of a Source.

Anima was looking at him as if she were reading his mind. Quatre looked back, not particularly bothered. She'd given them the stone, and he had the feeling this was a gesture that had much more depth and meaning than just putting it into Trowa's palm. Whatever happened, she could not take it back, so-

"No. No, that would not be wise. There is something in this one that I should not leave in contact with my Source for too long," Anima said slowly. Ah, so she was back to throwing cryptic remarks around. "It is not yet time. And he is not the one."

Trowa's fingers had tensed in alarm over Quatre's, probably at the 'there is something in this one'. Quatre's fingers were digging into his lover's in return. Zero was having a field day trying to figure out what those last two sentences meant. Equations were going off in Quatre's mind like fireworks in a bag, until he wondered numbly if the top of his skull was about to be blown off.

_[4-(X3) - // Interrupt. Data drill query. Equation 'Fen - motivations', input required - strategy to obtain input available.]_

Quatre didn't try to think - at this point, he could barely hang on to his own mind, much less think. He knew why Zero needed this, he knew why it was important. He didn't question the plan as he turned towards Fen.

"If you want someone to stay with you tonight, Anima, maybe Fen could oblige?"

Fen started at being mentioned, and stared at Quatre and then at Anima as if he wasn't sure what was going on. "What? Why should I want to stay here? I want to get back to that bastard Maxwell before he pawns my Soul Stone or gets himself killed or something. Why would she want someone to stay with her anyway? She's got all this." His chin took in the scurrying creatures around the clearing.

Trowa and S stared back at Fen blankly, but Quatre wasn't terribly surprised that he had to elaborate. "She wants someone to have sex with her, Fen," he explained patiently.

Fen stared at him again as if he was now certain that Quatre was insane. "I'm not human, Winner, why should I-"

"Neither is she."

"Then neither of us should be interested." Fen gave Anima a look that suggested she belonged in the padded cell next to Quatre's, and went back to watching the rats move around the clearing with a mixture of suspicion and detached scientific curiosity. Anima was scrutinizing Fen and she didn't look very interested either, despite the fact that Fen was probably an even more appealing specimen than either Trowa or Quatre. Quatre nodded gently, slotting a few more results into his calculations.

"I care not for ever-lit lanterns. I prefer the bright fervor of the candle, flickering before it goes out," Anima murmured to nobody in particular. Then she glanced around. "And you? Are you attached to anybody at present?"

S, the one addressed, nearly fell over. "Me?!"

Of course, you, Quatre thought with both amusement and exasperation. The old shaman's dreaming soul was just as powerful as Trowa's, and what did a Goddess of raw primal nature care about someone's age and appearance? He was surprised S took a few startled seconds to come to the same conclusion.

S recuperated with commendable speed. "Anima, it would be a great honor and pleasure," he said, bowing slightly. Anima smiled. It was pleased, openly carnal, yet warm and welcoming. The darkness of death that lurked in nature was her domain, but also the raw force of life and birth, and sex was intimately linked into all that. For a shaman, touching such a living embodiment of their beliefs must be an amazing experience, as well as a deep and moving one. Quatre made a note to ask Trowa, later, what it had been like for him. Although on second thought, that might not be such a good idea. Trowa had probably had enough surprises and shocks for one day.

"Well, Trowa, my boy, you all be careful getting back to the edge of the jungle." S turned towards Trowa with a distracted smile. "If you leave now, you should be able to get through without that other Source sending out more jackals-"

"They will be safe. My friends will see to it," Anima murmured. Zero had already picked up the pattern of the dog-sized rats forming a circle around the party, preparing an escort.

"Perfect! Don't worry about me, I'll make my own way home. Trowa, in four nights the moon will be full. I will meet you in my dreams, by the left paw of the Great Bear Pattern."

"I'll see you then," Trowa murmured, smiling at his old teacher. Quatre noted the date. If the old shaman learned anything more from Anima and passed it to Trowa, Quatre would have to be sure to get the information from Trowa when his lover had finished his Dreamwalk the next morning.

Anima said nothing else, and did not answer their goodbyes. They left the silent Goddess and her night's lover alone in the clearing full of life, the small black stone tucked safely in Trowa's pack.

Quatre left Zero to speculate its heart out about the cryptic bits and pieces Anima had let drop. That was part and parcel with the huge equation it was working on, the strange, overlying pattern that stretched from a start point that Quatre couldn't put his finger on, all the way to the end of the universe. He did shunt a few of Zero's resources away from it, though, and used it to work on the more pertinent problem at hand.

They had two of the three stones that could fuel the shield spell. They should be able to find the third in time; they'd found the first two quickly enough. But that would not be enough to guarantee Juusan's defeat. Zero was coldly forthright about that. Even Heero, Wufei and Fen's concerted power might not be enough to stop all and every one of the possible attacks that Juusan and his armies could launch at them. Too many variables. There was not enough knowledge and/or power on their side to ensure victory, in every possible pattern of the future. If only Juusan wasn't such an imponderable...

"Winner?"

Quatre glanced up from his thoughts. "Yes?"

"You didn't answer me on the shuttle earlier." Fen looked annoyed. "Will you talk to Maxwell when we get back? Try to convince him to return my Soul Stone? I am useless to you if I do not have it."

Quatre stared at the fierce blue eyes, half-hidden under the ragged bangs that fluttered like loose threads of white silk as Fen walked.

"Yes, Phoenix," he heard himself say. "I will talk to Duo. I think that will be very useful."

He walked forward quickly, ignoring Fen's satisfied air and Trowa's puzzled look. The final parameters of a helpful equation were about to fall into place. Yes, it would be very useful indeed...

\---

Next Chapter: The Phoenix Gambit

Yet more proof that math can be bloody dangerous


	38. The Phoenix Gambit

**THEY'RE GOING TO BETRAY YOU!**

Duo bared his teeth in a snarl as the multi-throated scream echoed against the inside of his skull.

"No, forget it, I won't," he remembered to say aloud, just in case it wasn't obvious from the way he was savagely shaking his head.

"Duo-"

Whatever else Quatre had wanted to say was lost in the inner tumult.

**They're going to get rid of you!**  
**They don't trust you!**  
**And you shouldn't trust them!**

"I-"

**They're only human.**  
**They fear you...**  
**With reason!**

Duo's senses were screaming in alarm. Quatre was in front of him, with Trowa at his side. And Fen was on Quatre's other side, looking both urbane and implacable, boxing Duo in. Heero was leaning against a wall to the right, arms crossed, eyes on Duo through his lashes, and Wufei was seated at the table to his left, eating a bowl of stew Svale had whipped up for him. Duo had been about to sit down to his own lunch when Quatre and the others had shown up and-

**Cornered us! Surrounded us!**  
**No-**  
**Yes!**

Duo's eyes darted around the big common room. Imp clung to his shoulder, and he could distantly feel a tiny hand patting his neck, trying to center him - Imp could always tell when he was starting to lose it.

To his left, Wufei had frozen, spoon halfway to his mouth, staring at Duo through narrowed eyes. Shenlong suddenly rippled along his wrists.

**The Dragon is dangerous! Enemy! Juusan's one-time servant! Look- he's getting ready to attack you-**

In the part of his mind where Duo kept his own feelings and reason, he knew that Wufei was only reacting to Duo's fast-rising tension. After six years, Duo could distinguish which was his own voice and which was the scream of the revenge-driven multi-headed hydra within him. But they were... so loud...

Scrape of boot against floor- Duo's leather jacket jerked and started to solidify-

But it was only Quatre. He'd abruptly moved away, a hand slipped into Trowa's to pull the shaman after him.

"Come on, let's all sit down and talk about this reasonably. Heero, go get something to eat. Now."

Heero didn't look surprised at the order, and that was what it was. He turned neatly and went to the fireplace at the other side of the hall to go get a bowl of Svale's stew.

The ring of hostiles - allies, they were his allies, Duo reminded himself grimly. His allies were no longer surrounding him, and he relaxed slightly. There was only Fen left near Duo, and he could take Fen out, no problem.

The voices within him stilled to a distant mutter, a curdle at the edge of his senses, like a lingering scent of blood; they went back to brooding about their revenge. But they were still wary. A few of them prodded Duo to make his position clear.

"I am not giving Fen his Soul Stone back," he growled.

Fen looked at him with an appearance of calm, but there was something murderous deep in his ice-blue eyes.

Quatre had sat down near Wufei. Trowa was standing behind Quatre, a hand on his crossbow. Duo had a funny feeling, watching those two. Like a twisted echo. He remembered Trowa appraising him when they'd first met, hand on his crossbow, with the smaller healer behind him... Duo shook his head, clearing it. Heero had returned and crouched against the wall. He was holding a bowl of brown goop that Svale had dished up, but he showed no signs of eating it. Duo still felt a bit trapped, though now he had some leeway to fight or escape.

"Duo." Quatre sounded very reasonable. "Fen needs his Soul Stone to fight. Epyon and Zero can only get him so far. You dragged Fen into our group because you wanted him to be useful. Well, at this point, he isn't."

"If I give him his Soul back, he won't fight for us anymore," Duo ground out.

There was the slightest flicker in Quatre's eyes. "Of course he will. The Phoenix is bound to Center. This is his birthplace, his origin, it’s tied to his power and he can't leave it. If Juusan destroys it, he'll be just as screwed as the rest of us."

"Exactly. You have no need to coerce me, Jishin," Fen supplied.

**Liar. Liar! Shut up. No!**

Duo gritted his teeth. The echoes within his mind weren't overwhelming any more, but they were confusing. Quatre sounded so reasonable - what he said made sense-

 **Watch it. He could be using Zero against you-**  
**Ridiculous! He's only human! He cannot use Zero-**  
Oy, shut the fuck up, all of you, Duo thought painfully, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

"I don't trust him." I don't trust any of you. "I... even if he's not at full power, he can still oppose Juusan-"

"Be your cannon fodder, you mean?" Fen murmured, his voice glacial. "I think not."

Fen cast an eye around them, as if to show Duo that everybody supported the Phoenix's position. Duo licked his lips again, his eyes reluctantly following the same route-

**Alone! Always alone... don't trust them-**

Everybody was staring at Duo, waiting for him to be reasonable- no, not everybody. Wufei was glaring down at his stew, arms crossed, elbows on the table. He looked like he was trying to say something rather painful.

"What the Phoenix asks for is fair. And just," he finally said. "But in this instance, I think I can also see where the Jishin is coming from. I don't know the history behind all this, but what's to say Fen won't turn on us when he gets this whatever-stone back? Even if he only attacks the Jishin... the truth of the matter is, we cannot afford to lose any of our force at this point."

Quatre had tilted his head, as if to better listen to Wufei. Then he glanced at Fen, as if prompting the man for something.

Various emotions flickered across Fen's face; he looked confused. He stared at Quatre, and then the confusion vanished. Zero must have helped him gather enough of a consensus among his shattered memories and pasts to find a way forward. Duo felt a slight pang of compassion; Fen's head must be as busy as his own. But then again, Duo put up with it, so why shouldn't he?

"I'll give you my word," Fen announced, voice steely and proud. "I am the Phoenix, the ever-born. I will not attack Maxwell, and I will defend my home against Juusan, and fight with you to the best of my abilities if you return my Soul to me."

"Really." Wufei's voice dropped like a stone into the silence after that grand announcement, and Duo felt a flicker of strange warmth at the total lack of conviction in the Dragon's reply.

Fen shot Wufei a glare and opened his mouth to argue, but Quatre suddenly stood up. The movement was sure and purposeful, cutting neatly through the nascent argument.

"Duo," Quatre murmured, all reasonable and rational, with only a carefully measured hint of regret, "another aspect of the problem is that none of us feel comfortable fighting alongside someone who's being forced to obey you. Virtually enslaved, really."

In the background, Wufei flinched, and glared at his bowl of stew. Duo soundly cursed Quatre, whose words had - accidentally or intentionally - reminded the Dragon of Duo's one-time mark of control over him, and all his manipulations. There went Wufei's support, as tenuous as it'd been.

"You know Juusan's strength," Quatre continued. "In his present state, Fen won't be very useful even as cannon fodder." Fen's eyebrows curved, but he didn't interrupt the healer. "He's given his word. I trust him. We trust him. Give him his stone back."

**See? See?**

A few angry whispers echoed. Most of the voices had gone back to their dark dreams, but a few of them stayed awake, laughing sadly at their last descendant's foolishness, at the way he'd trusted these- these humans. The humans trusted Fen instead of Duo, despite the oath of blood and stone, despite everything.

Duo glanced around savagely, feeling trapped once more. He needed these people, he needed their help. And he hated that. When you manipulated people, at least you didn't have to worry about them betraying your trust. He'd fought so hard to get every scrap of power this planet possessed lined up against Juusan; he was reluctant to give up even a smidgen. If Fen's death slowed Juusan down by only a few seconds, that could mean the difference between victory and defeat. And besides, he controlled Fen. Among all these near-strangers that he was forced to trust, at least he knew where Fen stood. And now they wanted him to give up even that!

Quatre, Trowa and Fen were staring at him intently, expectantly. Svale was too, on the other side of the room, stirring the stew absently. The only people not staring at him were Wufei, who was glaring at the table, and Heero, who was listening, eyes closed, as if meditating. Or... waiting. That didn't make Duo feel any more at ease.

Imp was making tiny growling noises on Duo's shoulder, feeling the attack on its master. It was oddly comforting; at least he had someone on his side... It helped him center himself, and resign himself to the inevitable.

"Very well. Don't come crying to me when it all blows up in your face, Winner," Duo muttered. He ignored the screeches and protests within his head with the ease of years of practice. Most of the dead were silent; they didn't trust Fen, of course, but neither did they respect him much as a fighter, not when they, the Jishin, had been felled single-handedly by Juusan. They didn't think Fen mattered. Maybe they were right.

Duo reached out and drew a symbol in the empty air at eye-height; his mind concurrently tracing the same symbol, infusing it with magic. Arosaa. Reveal. The fold in the Ether where he'd hidden the stone broke and dropped it into his waiting palm. Fen grunted softly. Duo knew the Phoenix had been sending his Zero-assisted mind all over the planet, searching for the stone - did Winner even know that? Why did Quatre and the others trust this- this- Duo growled and tossed the stone at the Phoenix. He'd hidden the stone so carefully, with all his knowledge and magic, folding it into a pocket of Ether so that it was always within reach, yet completely inaccessible if you did not know exactly how it'd been hidden. He shouldn't have bothered. Allies. They were more of a bother than anything else.

Fen caught the stone and closed his fingers over it. He breathed out slowly, as if letting go of a heavy load, his eyes closed.

For a brief instant, a look of peace touched Fen's face and gave it a look of such beauty and serenity that Duo found himself thinking he'd actually done the right thing.

Then the eyes flew open and Duo knew he hadn't.

The tables screeched against the flagstones, chairs fell over, and the windows rattled. The air started to sparkle and burn. Golden-red fire, like a pair of wings, spread out behind Fen. The stone shot out of his palm, hovered over his chest. The air seemed to writhe and suddenly the stone was hanging from a thick chain around Fen's neck, like it had been when Duo had stolen it.

The Phoenix smiled. It wasn't the slightly concussed smile of the confused Fen that Duo knew. It was knowing, ancient and cruel. This creature was not human, and it wanted blood.

**Betrayed!**

It was only one shout, and then Duo's inner multitudes were standing fully behind him. As much as they might bitch and moan, when the chips were down they supported their last scion, the instrument of their revenge. Nobody in the crowd of angry and dead mages was particularly surprised at this turn of events. Neither was Shi No Kami.

Duo realized he was grinning fiercely, a crude, jeering parody of the Phoenix's ancient and wise smile. Dark magic howled and crackled from Duo's fingertips, from the tip of his braid, from the twisting thong in his hair which snapped like a whip. His armor solidified, hard surfaces and cruel spikes, covering part of his face, his torso, his legs and arms; darkness coalesced around him, shields and magic creeping around him like shadows against the Phoenix's burning light.

Movement on either side of him - he cursed and brought up mental defenses to shield him in that direction as well. Surrounded! His dead felt no surprise; he was going to have to fight all of them. Betrayed. Humans. Couldn't trust them. They were going to support Fen against him. The Phoenix was powerful, they would want his help against the Scourge, and, Duo admitted bitterly, Fen hadn't lied to them, manipulated them, burned marks of control in their minds or otherwise hurt them.

So, that was how it would be. He'd be alone to face Juusan after all-

The lack of furious attack on his flanks finally caught up with him. That and the way the Phoenix's burning magic had paused, the way Fen was glaring. Duo chanced a quick glance to his left and right.

Heero had walked up to stand at his right. Duo realized that the strange warrior had put down his stew quite neatly on the floor as if he’d expected this development all along. Did anything ever fluster the bastard? If there was, a raging, burning Phoenix was apparently not it. Heero looked perfectly calm, arms crossed over his chest. But Wing was deployed, and there was a sense of power throbbing in the air around him. His eyes were on Fen, unflinching; the fiery light danced, reflected in his pupils.

Duo glanced at his left. He felt a bit gratified to see that, unlike the imperturbable Heero, Wufei had dropped his bowl and knocked over his chair to get into position before the Phoenix could attack. But the Dragon didn't look terribly surprised at this turn of events either. Duo remembered the way Wufei had said 'Really' earlier. He'd not trusted the Phoenix any more than Duo had. Shenlong rippled along the white tunic; light flickered near Wufei's eyes as the analyzer started to dissect Fen and Epyon, looking for a weakness. Its owner was staring at the Phoenix with the murderous glare he'd given Duo when the latter had tried to stab him in the back. Wufei did not like people who broke their oaths.

They were... flanking Duo. They were on his side.

Duo tried to get his head around the concept, but it was proving hard. The Dragon was an enemy to many of the dead in his mind, and Heero, well, nobody knew what the hell Heero was.

But there they were.

Fen had looked quite ready to tear right into the Jishin, but it was obvious that even an enraged Phoenix wasn't dumb enough to run that particular gauntlet.

The inner army behind Duo's eyes were staring at the tableaux they formed, pretty much like Fen was doing, but with very different feelings. For once, their mental voice was nearly shorn of hate and anger, with only echoes of surprise, and something alien... something almost like hope.

...We... might actually have a chance. We might actually defeat Him...

The Him wasn't Fen. There was only one Him in Duo's torn and faceted mind. The bit that was pure Duo smirked. Yes, Fen; for us or against us, you're only a bump in the road. An incident, before the arrival of the real thing.

Someone moved behind him. Duo tensed, but the touch against his shoulder was soft. He glanced around. He noticed Trowa off to one side, bow drawn and aiming at a spot very near Fen, obviously not looking for a fight, but ready for one if need be.

Quatre had circled behind the fighters. He was leaning, one arm against Heero's shoulder, the other on a fairly un-spiky area of Duo's armor. Outwardly, Quatre looked relaxed. And also completely unsurprised. Apparently everybody had expected this; a fact that Duo would be sure to investigate thoroughly once they put out the fire, and the Phoenix with it.

The healer's eyes weren't even focused on the dangerous creature before him; they were moving very quickly, as if he were speed-reading something in mid-air. The darkness of Duo's power seemed to drink in the reflection of the Phoenix's magic. Against the shadows that reached out like dark wings behind him, Quatre seemed to be glowing ever so faintly. The Phoenix's light was playing off something, sparking minute, evanescent lines around Quatre, there and gone as soon as Duo tried to focus on them. They were shooting and flickering around him, like very thin cracks rapidly growing in a block ice.

There was a slight huff from Fen, and Duo quickly brought his attention back to where it mattered. The Phoenix was no longer glaring at Duo as if he wanted to rip out his spine and beat him over the head with it, which was a slight improvement. He was staring at Quatre.

"I see. Well played, Winner." But Fen didn't sound particularly angry. Indifferent, with an edge of cold amusement. "Did you get what you wanted?"

"Yes," Quatre answered. "You may go."

Duo felt the slightest shiver walk up his back, and he'd thought his back was fairly shiver-proof by now. The way Quatre had said that: cold, devoid of emotion, implacable and dismissive... if he'd spoken to Duo like that, Duo would have gone, even if he'd had to make a hole in the wall to do so. He could feel Wufei start beside him. Duo glanced at Trowa, a bit reluctantly, and then looked away from what he saw in the man's eyes. Heero hadn't moved a muscle since he'd appeared at Duo's side; he didn't look surprised, upset, or even aware of Quatre leaning against his shoulder. Unflappable goon. Duo rather envied him at this point.

The only other one who didn't look impressed was Fen. His eyes had narrowed, but his smile stayed fixed. He looked... beyond surprise, beyond caring about what any of the insects before him could do. But there was a hint of amusement in his eyes. Duo was ready to bet that the joke wasn't anything that a mortal would find even remotely funny. The Jishin fought down another shiver. The way Fen was looking at them... it reminded him of-

The Phoenix flexed his infernal wings, cracking a window and sending old dust shivering from the rafters. A chair fell over with a prosaic thump, a contrast to the raw magic sizzling in the air.

"Very well, Winner," said the creature of light and fire. "I'll leave you with your puppets, and I will watch with interest when Juusan kills you all. Farewell, little mortals. Who knows, we might see each other again before the end."

The air seemed to explode. Duo staggered, shields raised, shadows momentarily ripped apart by the light-

When he opened his eyes, there was nothing before him but the empty common room, a lot of glaring red afterimages carved into his cornea by the final flash, and Svale, on the other side of the long hall, knocked nearly into the fireplace, with stew all over her black dress.

"Well," she muttered, in the eerie silence. "That went down like a lead balloon."

Duo took a breath in and let it out again. It started out a bit wobbly, but ended in a hiss. He stepped away abruptly from Quatre.

"Talk, Winner. What the hell was all that about?"

Quatre didn't answer him immediately. His eyes were not quite focused, and Duo thought he was leaning a bit heavily against Heero. His eyes were almost closed, nearly-white lashes brushing cheeks that were suddenly pale.

"Quatre... ?" Trowa took a few steps towards his lover, voice anxious.

Something seemed to shut off in Quatre. Duo watched warily as a mask slipped over the pale features.

"I'm fine. Just something I had to think about. A line of thought I didn't want to interrupt." Quatre sounded perfectly calm. Not that anybody took that at face value.

"Will he attack us again?" Wufei asked abruptly. Good ol' Dragon, Duo thought; always practical and hard-headed. Who cared about Phoenixes and burning magic and potentially crazy healers with spells taking over their minds, when there might be someone to thump?

"No. He won't think it's worth it."

"You sound very sure of that," Wufei said slowly, eyes narrowed.

"I am. Now."

The healer turned and took a few steps away, oblivious of all the eyes on him.

"You knew he was going to turn on me," Duo challenged as he watched Quatre stumble, almost blind, across the flagstones to go and stare out the window.

"I knew he was going to turn on us," Quatre corrected him gently.

"Us," Duo muttered not very gracefully, even as he remembered the way Heero and Wufei had appeared at his side. Part of him didn't want to acknowledge that. Didn't want to rely on that.

"Why did you get Maxie to give him his rock back, then? As the one whose dining room was destroyed, I think I'm entitled to know," Svale snapped, appearing before Duo and hopping up and down like an enraged crow. A few drops of stew splattered on the flagstones.

Quatre stared at her, and Svale suddenly shut up, eyes narrowed.

"It was necessary." Quatre still sounded so calm. "I needed to know... something. I needed to know more about Juusan, how he was going to attack us, how he thinks. And now, I do."

The way he said that... nobody made a sound. They didn't even move. Duo had to remind himself to breathe.

In the complete silence, Quatre turned, after a last glance out the window. He hoisted himself up onto the window sill and sat there, feet dangling, staring down at his boots. He looked very young, innocent, blonde, cute and so much in control it was absolutely terrifying, and Duo had thought himself immune to terror by now.

"Duo, you know a lot about Juusan, but you do not know enough."

Quatre paused. He waited the exact length of time it took for Duo's inner screams to die, for the cries of revenge, for the lashings of hate and anger to fade until they could no longer cover his voice, and then he continued. Duo didn't like the way that had looked entirely planned. Quatre couldn't read his mind, could he? No.

"You do not know how Juusan thinks," Quatre continued. "He is beyond even the Jishin."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Duo growled.

"Juusan is an Immortal. Like Fen," Quatre stated simply.

He seemed to think the conclusion to his words was obvious. The silence and the lack of 'oh, but of course!' must have told him it wasn't.

"They are immortal. We are mortal," Quatre explained slowly, as he was talking to a bunch of four-year-olds. "We do not - and will never have - the same mindset."

"He lied. He betrayed his word like it was nothing. Just like Juusan." Wufei's voice was quiet, speculative. But Duo was beginning to know his Dragon by now, and he knew what the ugly light in those black eyes meant. If Fen were here, right now, he'd have a Dragon fang shoved down his throat, Phoenix or not. Wufei held things like honor and oaths rather highly.

"Why should he hold his word?" Quatre asked patiently. "Think about it. I know it's not easy to imagine something so alien to us as immortality. Humans have evolved over millions of years, and in all that time, we have been born, we have had children to continue our line-"

Quatre stopped again, right on cue, as if he could really hear the moans of pain and sadness echoing through Duo's mind.

"And then we die," he concluded quietly, just as the chorus faded. Duo would have been worried and paranoid about that, but he was too down in the dumps to care. No more children for the Jishin. Their line was dead.

"We mortals cannot relate to a creature who has not evolved like that, who has not, in fact, evolved at all. The wheel does not turn for Immortals. It is always as it is, as it was, as it ever will be. Forever. Fen gave us his word, because he realized it could help him get something that mattered to him. It is absolutely inconsequential to him that he keep it. We are already dead, in his eyes. Even if we defeat Juusan, even if we all live to the ripe old age of, say, eighty, or a hundred, or a thousand years old... we'll still be nothing but motes of dust to Fen. Already we are dead; we know he broke his word, but already that is only a warning we passed to our descendants when we died; then it is a rumor, when our descendants die; then it is legend, then it is forgotten, and nothing will have changed for him.

"That is what being an immortal is about."

**He did it on purpose.**

The words were coldly calculating and steeped with some admiration; the makers of Zero, now dead and ensconced in Duo's mind, were coming to some interesting conclusions. They had decided decades ago that Zero was too dangerous to use, even for the Jishin, and they were having a hard time admitting a mere human had mastered it this much, but the evidence was there before them. Quatre had been following a controlled strategy. He had voluntarily freed the Phoenix, just so that he could measure, analyze and track the parameters of how an immortal behaved and reacted.

"Understanding Fen... will help you understand Juusan," Duo enounced slowly.

"Yes. They are the same. I know they have never met, that they are on a different level of magic entirely, but at the heart of it, they are the same. Immortal. Ever-lasting. Inhuman in a way that we can barely comprehend. The only difference... " Quatre's voice faded.

"The only difference is that Juusan wants something." The healer's eyes were turned inwards when he continued. "Juusan has some higher purpose. This is a strong motivator to his actions, it's crucial to him. I can read it in his lines, now that I can understand him better."

Duo was massively impressed. Quatre had just dropped that casually, as if seeing the lines of the most massive power in the galaxy was child's play. The entire combined strength of the Jishin had been unable to comprehend Juusan. Duo felt a prickle in his scalp. He'd been right about Zero. The spell was as powerful as he'd assumed it would be. And just as scary, too.

A jagged smile twisted Duo's lips. Scary was good. The Jishin had invented scary. They were the things that went bump in the night, the fair folk who stole children from the cribs, who created fairy mounds and nightmares. And Duo was Jishin. That kind of manifestation of mystical power, especially on his side, was sending pleasant little shivers across his shoulders.

"I don't know what this purpose is, unfortunately," Quatre continued as if talking to himself. "Fen's behavior could not illuminate this part of Juusan's mindset, they are different in this. This purpose has to do with the Source of all Things, the First as Juusan called it. The Scourge is an aspect of it. Duo? You and I, and your ghosts, are going to have to have a chat at one point."

Oh wonderful, something else to look forward to. "If you want. I gotta warn you... um... "

"I know they are not very coherent these days, but I think I can get some information out of them," Quatre said, his voice gentle, his eyes hard. Duo felt his lips twitch away from his teeth, and his razor-sharp gauntlets bit into his palm as the scrutiny took him apart, judged him and slotted him neatly into a pigeonhole under 'difficult but manageable'. Fuck, if this was what Trowa had been living with for the past few months, no wonder the shaman was looking so down these days; and no wonder he'd been about a second away from sticking Duo full of arrows, too, before they'd come to some sort of peaceful understanding.

"I don't understand any of this!" Wufei growled, obviously unimpressed by all these cryptic pronouncements. It had the same effect as the chair falling over earlier. The darkness and eerie feeling dispersed, and there was only a cross Dragon glaring at a young blond man sitting on a windowsill. "What do you know of Juusan's plans? What the hell is going on? Why did we just free someone who might well attack us, or ally himself to Juusan?"

“The Dragon don't know squat about magic, but he's got a point,” Duo murmured, lifting an eyebrow at Quatre.

Quatre sighed and rubbed his temples gently.

"Okay, here's a quick and dirty summary. Please do not question me on how I know this, unless you want me to spend the next three months explaining higher mathematics and probability schemas to you.

"We _had_ to free Fen. He would not have helped us against Juusan. I know why you roped him into our little army, Duo, it sounded like a good idea to get him to fight, but it wouldn't have worked. Juusan has enough power to destroy the Phoenix. Not kill him. As we both know, the Phoenix does not stay dead. No, the Scourge can destroy him for real, for ever. Because of that, Fen would never have gone near Juusan. He would have attacked us, run away, anything, but not helped us."

"He could have kissed his rock goodbye if he'd done that," Duo countered.

"That would have been an acceptable loss to him," Quatre countered right back, an edge of annoyance in his voice, as if Duo was being unusually obtuse. "What do you think that stone is? It's an accretion, a physical manifestation of his myriad of memories and past lives. It holds his psyche together, it reminds him of who he is, of all the names he's worn through the eons. He wants it, yes. But he will not risk destruction to get it. To an Immortal, the notion of their physical destruction, of no longer existing, is on par with- with the destruction of the entire human race for us. Humans do not fear death like an Immortal does, because we have children, people who carry on our genetic heritage, our ideals, our memories. They carry parts of us throughout time. We are immortal too in that way. It's a way an Immortal can never grasp. Fen doesn't see the point of sex, of children, of procreation, of living on in legends. He only sees that he exists now, and if he is destroyed, there will be nothing after him. There is no continuation. It's _The End_. And that terrifies him more than any mere momentary insanity ever could.

"As humans, we care about things like that." For the briefest moment, his eyes flashed towards Trowa. "We don't live long, so we want to have control of our lives, we want to be healthy, happy and sane. If he'd lost his stone, Fen would have been insane for thousands of years. But time is not important for Immortals. He would have eventually gotten over it, and he'd have formed a new stone from new memories. This moment in time would be forgotten. No, the Soul Stone was not the weapon over him you thought it was, Duo."

"But what about what you said? That if Juusan destroys the planet, he'll die too?" Wufei shot out.

"I lied," Quatre chirped with a disarming grin. "I'm surprised Fen bought that; he should know I would never be dumb enough to think that. He really was confused without his stone. Yes, if we fail, Juusan will destroy every form of life on Center and Fen will die too. But-"

"But in seven years time, he'll be reborn again!" Duo snarled, thumping his head with his mailed fist. " **Shit! Idiot!** I should have-"

"It's hard to think out of our mortal mindset," Quatre reassured him, ignoring the way the old Words of Power (used in a rather unusually crude way) rattled the pane of glass behind him. "Actually, I imagine Fen would opt to stay dead for thousands of years, millions if need be. It'd be boring to be reborn on a dead planet. It doesn't matter. The universe won't end for another ten billion years, so really, what's a few million years' wait until life returns to Center? For an Immortal, that time is nothing."

"So he won't attack Juusan, but he might attack us," Wufei concluded, cracking his knuckles slowly and getting back to the heart of the matter.

"Why should he?" Quatre asked with a shrug.

Wufei stared, visibly caught short. "Maxwell coerced him, stole his Soul, and we were going to force him to fight Juusan. He must hate us considerably."

"No, that's what _you'd_ do, but that's not how Fen thinks," Quatre contradicted patiently. "Fen would have destroyed us right here and now, as an afterthought, just for the annoyance we caused him. But we are not important enough for him to hate us, Wufei. We are just humans, and in a few months, which is no time at all for him, we'll all be dead. Not just us. All humans on Center. And he doesn't have to take any risks for this to happen. If a rat bit you, you'd kick it to death, and any other rat you saw too. But you wouldn't risk serious injury to do so, and you wouldn't hunt down that particular rat and its friends once you'd calmed down. Not when you knew the exterminator was coming in a few months."

Duo was beginning to see what Quatre was saying. The sheer weight of time behind Fen, watching the dance of the ridiculous, tiny, mayflies called humans, living and dying repeatedly all around him, never touching him...

He felt cold, with only his hate burning sharp and hot within him; the tips of his gloves were slicing into his palms, the pain grounding him.

"Juusan," he said softly. "That's who he reminded me of, at the end. When he got his stone back, when he remembered who he was. He looked at us just like Juusan did when he-" Duo snarled and turned away abruptly.

"He reminded me of the Scourge from the start," Wufei stated. "I never trusted him, and we're better off without him. If he's not going to attack us, good. But personally, and no offense, Winner, I believe we should prepare for the eventuality. Yuy!"

Heero finally moved, turning his head slightly at the hail.

"I don't know about you, but I've lost my appetite. Let's go and train. It looks like you and I are the only ones left to oppose Juusan physically. We need to work together, it is crucial we understand each other's fighting styles and armors. And I want you to learn how to use the headpiece. And have you even drawn the sword? You're lucky to have it; my own weapon was broken when I attacked the Scourge on my home world, over a year ago. Now-" his voice faded as he marched out the door. Heero followed him without protest.

Duo glanced at Quatre. "You said you know how Juusan will attack us. I thought it was obvious myself. He'll come here and pound us-"

"No. He won't," Quatre corrected him simply and firmly, as if he were reading it out of the newspaper. "I know you think you frightened him, Duo. And in a way you did. You threatened him, you and this shield, and nobody has done that for - well, eons. But to him, you are still... just human. He will not risk a head-on confrontation with us. He has no hate towards us. We are bacteria to him. Possibly dangerous bacteria, that he does not want to go near. An Immortal never takes a risk to his existence that he can avoid.

"He will send his men to attack first, as a distraction. But he will not trust them to succeed, or even to die for him. Juusan does not understand the concepts of honor, loyalty and bravery. These concepts are human, we evolved them in contact with our equals. Juusan has no equal, he is alone in the universe. He will send his men, but he will follow them closely, not trusting them to distract us for long. He will appear on the other side of the planet - I hope you can teleport that far, Duo, with Heero and Wufei in tow. You will have to block Juusan's magic, and the others will have to attack him quickly. Juusan will try to gather what power he can under the shield, and send a massive flare sweeping the planet. Center and her power are intimately linked with all life on her. A truly massive wave of destruction will disrupt the power sources of our shield. Not for very long, but long enough. Juusan will not attack the sanctuary, though. He will take the opportunity of the shield falling briefly to integrate his Source. Then he has all the time he wants to re-source himself. Zero estimates it will take anywhere up to ten hours. When he's finished, he'll come out of his Source, burn a hole all the way to the planet's core where the sanctuary used to be, make sure that there isn't even an amoeba or piece of plankton left alive, and then he'll leave Center and kill every human within a parsec, just to be on the safe side.” 

Quatre hopped off of the window sill and dusted his hands. "Then he'll go on with his purpose. Whatever that is. Was that all you wanted to know?"

Duo realized his mouth was open, and that shiver was back and camping out on his spine like it meant to stay. But the ornery part of himself, the bit that had refused to die six years ago, the bit that flipped the universe the bird and laughed like a maniac, that bit rallied and drawled: "Is that a fact?"

"Yes. To eighty-seven percent probability. There is an additional nine point six spread on some details being off, but not enough to affect the overall strategy. The rest of that hundred percent is the slim margin of chance that Juusan's overall purpose will change something significant in the way he acts, in a way I cannot foresee. In that case, our strategies will have to be reactive, and our chances of victory fall beneath an acceptable threshold. Any other questions?"

"No," Duo answered weakly. "I'm good."

"Very well. I have to go think about some of these elements I picked up from Fen. There may be other things we can do to maximize our chances of winning. If you'll excuse me-"

Duo nodded, still a bit stunned, as Quatre walked towards the front door. Then Trowa passed Duo, caught up with the healer in three long strides, hooked a hand beneath the other's arm, and dragged him away from the front door. Quatre looked up quickly, but didn't protest. Duo thought there was the tiniest downturn to the lips in the otherwise impassive expression, a hint of sadness in the blue eyes. Then they were gone, and the door to their room shut firmly behind the pair.

Svale shook herself. She looked about to say something, but Duo wasn't interested. He headed towards the door, deep in thought.

He meant to go up to the highest mound of the Sanctuary, or maybe teleport to his hideout to think. Instead, his feet took him around the low building where Svale had made her home, to the big depression, like a shallow bowl, behind the sanctuary. Wufei went there to practice those weird martial art moves early in the morning; Duo had not followed him there, he had just happened to be awake at the time. The Dragon spent hours on those exercises; not that Duo had stayed to watch specifically, he just hadn't had anything better to do at that point, and he had wanted to evaluate Wufei as a fighter. The place had become an unofficial training ground a couple of days ago, when Heero had joined Wufei there to perform one-handed press-ups an absurd number of times. Even Duo had slunk there late at night, when the other two were asleep, to practice his magic and see how much the shield had impacted upon it. The place was safe, protected, and the dip of the bowl-like depression meant that a stray bolt of force or magic couldn't hurt the Sanctuary nearby.

Sure enough, the two knuckle-heads were there. Duo sat down on a small rock at the edge of the grounds and stared at the pair. He didn't pay much attention to Wufei's words. Sounded like the Dragon was explaining about the headpiece.

"The psychic buffer of the helm will protect your mind against mental and magical attacks for a short while," Wufei was saying.

Heero looked less than enthusiastic.

"I know you're strong, Yuy!" Wufei barked. He'd make an excellent drill-instructor, Duo thought. "Trust me, I'd be happy if strength alone were enough. But only fools ignore the tactics of the weak and traitorous, of cowardly magic users."

Ouch, I almost felt that, Duo sneered internally. Actually, he didn't think it had been aimed at him at all. Wufei was probably thinking about the Scourge. Maybe. It was difficult to judge. Duo and that uptight Dragon had hammered... _something_ out, the other day in the Arena of the Trials. He just wasn't sure what it was. At all. He didn't think Wufei knew either, from the glances, both searching, puzzled and annoyed, that the Dragon gave him when he thought Duo wasn't looking. Whatever it was, it didn't mean that they disliked each other any less, of course. Duo felt sure they'd still spar, verbally and maybe even physically, as soon as they'd get the chance. But they wouldn't compromise their ultimate goal to do so. They'd stand, side by side against Juusan.

Allies...

"You're going to have to get used to it. The headpiece is an integral part of the armor. Besides, as that ridiculous 'Doom' creature demonstrated, when it comes to psychic attacks, you're just as human as the rest of us."

Just human.

That's what Quatre had said. Just human.

Duo had never thought of himself as human, or as 'just' anything. He was Jishin. The oldest race. The Tricksters. The ones who haunted the nightmares of humans, and their most seductive dreams.

Just human...

The noon-day sun seemed to darken, and Duo's armor tightened and curled around him defensively. Yes, compared to the Immortals... even Duo Maxwell, the last Jishin, was just human.

It scared him. Deeply. Humans were nothing. A mere human could never win against Juusan.

**Not alone.**

The thought wasn't his, but the voice was achingly familiar. Duo stiffened slowly, mind turned inwards, staring blindly at the spot where Heero was turning on his headpiece and glaring grumpily through the flicker of light.

...Solo?

It was gone. Duo kept his pain buried inside where it wouldn't show on his face, where he wouldn't have to share it with anybody. It was his. The thought didn't make much sense, but then, these days, not much did.

"Is it getting any better?"

"What is?" Duo shot back, in a voice that was as menacing as he could make it this morning.

Svale sat herself down on the rock next to him and scratched at a stew stain on her dress.

"Your eternal choir," she grunted. "All the dead guys in your head."

"Fuck off, you old bat."

"I could get your mind off it, if you want?"

Duo shot her a suspicious look, and got a good view of a leer that would have looked better on a thousand-year-old mummy. Strangely enough, it did get his mind off things. The giant 'ick' shook off his blues.

"I don't understand why it's so bad... normally, at your age, the Soul-mind should be integrated into your memories... " Svale was talking artlessly, casually. It was an offer to listen, not an order to explain.

Just human... Duo stared at Wufei who was gesturing wildly - apparently Heero had done something rather bone-headed with the communicator Wufei was trying to teach him to use. Duo felt a slight smile twist his lips. Heero was quite probably the most powerful creature on the face of the planet until the Scourge arrived, but he was getting scolded like a school boy. That Wufei... he just didn't know the meaning of the word 'fear'. Or 'tact'. And he packed one hell of a punch... if he wasn't a mechanical techno-geek, he'd make one hell of Jishin... Duo Maxwell, what the hell are you thinking of...

"Yes, normally by the time we're adults, the Soul-mind is harmoniously integrated with our own," Duo explained softly. He listened to himself idly spilling secrets and wondered why it wasn't even making him twinge. Just human...

"I hear it's supposed to be like a library, except each book has a small piece of the personality of its original owner," he continued, staring at the two in the training grounds. "It’s information and power and a connection to our roots. But... not for me. It was the way they died. All at once, with the damn Scourge’s energy signature polluting the Halls of the Dead. It... stressed the magic that allows passage and integration of souls into the Soul Mind. They're not blending. The way they died, screaming, in terrible pain and madness, bloodthirsty for revenge... they're not integrating into the whole, into the meld of souls, and their anger is corrupting it."

"They don't know they're dead?"

"Oh, they know, alright," Duo said dryly. "They just don't want to rest until they can drag Juusan down with them."

Soon. It was the briefest touch, again. Solo. He was just a drop in the ocean, but his voice was a warm, loving touch amidst the cold anger and hate. He'd died thinking of Duo, worrying about his young cousin. He was still present because he wanted to stay with Duo, and help him against the multitude who was giving him his power, his magic, his knowledge and his madness.

**Soon... soon it will be over, and we can all rest.**

Yes, Duo thought.

Six years of this. It was only thanks to Solo and his own natural resilience that his mind was still largely intact. And thanks to Imp, too. The little creature was still hiding in his pocket; the Phoenix had given it a bad turn. But until Fen had disappeared, it had been on Duo's shoulder, hissing defensively. Imp was of Iwanohone's rock and bones, formed from Duo's blood and the earth of his home. The little creature had been his only friend for those six years. No touch of fellow minds, no Solo to cuff him gently, no long suffering tutors, no Eldest to absently-on-purpose leave resin candy near his open window, no songs rising in the warmth of a magical evening, no warmth of kindred magic and souls. Just the screams of the dead, thoughts of revenge, and the paranoia, distrust and contempt that all Jishin felt for the rest of the human races, compounded by the Jishin's destruction through treachery. Duo had never even thought, in all those years, to trust other humans. He'd never thought of joining forces with them. Manipulation and trickery were embedded into the Jishin's mentality. He'd never even questioned his methods.

Maybe that had been a mistake...

He ignored, by force of habit, a few sneers from his dead. The Jishin had been betrayed, tricked, slaughtered. They wanted revenge and they trusted nobody. And maybe they were right. Yes, they were probably right.

But at this point, he didn't have a choice, and that brought him a strange sense of relief.

"Good. You have the basics," Wufei announced. "Now practice is essential. The helm, the visor, the buffer and communicator have to be easy to use, even in the midst of heated battle. Otherwise they'll be nothing but distractions. You have to - oof!!"

Well, what did he expect, Duo laughed inwardly. Heero had been obviously getting a bit antsy during all this theory. The way his face had lit up when Wufei had said 'practice' had made Duo wince. There was only one way Heero knew how to practice.

Wufei rolled and dodged the second blow, and shot to his feet. He didn't look furious, as Duo had expected. A bit put out, yes, and ruffled by that unannounced blow that had gotten through his guard, but other than that... there was a gleam in his eyes, a vibrant energy in his stance, that spoke volumes. It was a strange sort of joy. Wufei was a good tactician, a dedicated warrior, a fanatic for his revenge, but what he still liked to do best was hit somebody, Duo thought sardonically.

Not that Duo was any different, when it came to using his battle-magic. That clarity, that moment of sweet concentration when every other worry faded and you could just be, and act, and things obeyed you because you were stronger than they were, you were in control... Duo realized he had a dreamy smile on his face. He shook his head and concentrated. He had to keep an eye on these two idiots. Now more than ever, they could not afford an injury to either of them.

Wufei dodged and blocked, and his fist shot out with breath-taking speed to jab at Heero. Heero blocked it, solid as a rock. Nary an expression crossed his features, yet somehow Duo intuited that Heero was enjoying himself as well, as much as he knew how. He spun, and threw himself at Wufei. The two short punches that followed were measured, to Duo's relief. Apparently Heero did know that you weren't supposed to kill anybody during a practice fight. Wufei must have already explained the concept to him before Duo had shown up.

"Use the buffer-" Wufei snapped, out of breath. "I am going to - " he dodged, and kicked. Heero dodged the blow gracefully and Wufei had to back away hastily from his retaliation. Heero hadn't even broken a sweat. "I'm going to start using Shenlong to send small psychic attacks at you while I-" a hurried parry "-while I attack. Be ready."

Heero grunted, and then flinched. Duo hadn't seen the attack; it was a psionic jab, probably a mentat weapon, not magic. Dragons didn't have much in the way of psy attacks, but they could do a little damage. Wufei had attacked at just the right moment, body and mind a single deadly weapon, and Heero was caught flat-footed, momentarily blinded. Wufei dodged a wild blow, slipped under Heero's arm, grasped, twisted, threw him over his shoulder, and then jumped on him. Heero landed with a thump and a grunt, and tried to fight Wufei off, but he was winded, and the Dragon managed to immobilize him.

Wufei said something - about the buffer and using it. Duo tried to concentrate on the fact that the two morons should be careful not to injure each other, but he had, ah, a hard time concentrating... Heero was caught under Wufei, pinned down by the Dragon straddling him; black hair, loosened from the pony-tail by the first blow, drifted into Heero's face - Duo managed to swallow, and closed his mouth sharply. He shook his head abruptly, desperately trying to get the mental picture out of his mind. He glanced worriedly at Svale to check if she’d caught that look on his face. The old mummy already had some crazy notion about him and the stupid Dragon, he didn't need to add fuel to her fire.

Svale hadn't noticed Duo's pole-axed expression, or how close he'd come to drooling. She wasn't looking at him, and she was definitely not looking at the pair of flushed fighters, Wufei trying to give Heero a lecture, still in that rather interesting position, and Heero squirming and jerking in a way that was making Duo's temperature spike.

Despite the interesting stuff happening in the training grounds, Duo felt his attention drawn back to Svale. She had a look on her face that Duo had never seen there before. She looked her age for once. Duo had never realized how much her sprightly energy had, in fact, made her appear a bit younger than her five hundred plus years. She looked old, weary, and sad beyond understanding.

She was looking back at the main compound. Duo followed her gaze, and suddenly remembered the door shutting behind Trowa and Quatre.

\---

Next Chapter: Show me.

Higher mathematics and relationships don’t go together all that well.


	39. Show Me

"Just tell me one thing... "

Trowa had his back almost completely turned to Quatre. He was standing, shoulders stiff, near the small desk where Quatre prepared unguents and potions for his healer's craft.

Quatre leaned back against the wall near their bed and waited, but Trowa had fallen silent. The shaman was rubbing his hands together as if they were cold. Then one of his long fingers moved a pot of antiseptic lotion on the desk, to line it up more neatly with the others. Quatre watched him with morbid fascination. In the three years - nearly four now - they'd been together, he couldn't remember seeing Trowa ever make a nervous gesture. Until now, he didn't think the shaman even knew how to fidget.

"Yes?" he finally prompted. He wanted this conversation about as much as he wanted to lose a limb, but it was inevitable, and maybe it had been delayed long enough. Zero quietly computed the most likely starting point of Trowa's last argument, down to 5% probability. Quatre waited to see which way the shaman would broach the subject.

Trowa finished righting the row of little pots. They left a smear of dust on his fingers; he stared at it somberly for a few seconds, before wiping it off his hands with a rough, nearly angry gesture. The pattern of his aura fluctuated between hurt and worry.

"Just tell me one thing: is it still possible for you to get rid of Zero?"

Quatre's head sank a fraction. Zero had calculated that the most likely start to their inevitable break-up would be a demand by Trowa that Quatre give up the spell.

This question was a direct lead-on to that demand. Quatre didn't even have to bother with Zero, he could feel it with his empathy alone. But the fact that Trowa had thought to ask if it was possible first, meant that he was still capable of being reasonable about the whole matter.

Zero studiously added a few parameters to the equations that predicted the shaman's behavior. The spell's assessments of Trowa's strategies and his actions in battle were overall faultless. It also managed to predict a lot of Trowa's behavior towards others, such as Duo and Heero. When it came to Trowa's interaction with Quatre, however, Zero got it mostly right, but on several occasions, the shaman had acted more patiently or reservedly than the spell had calculated as likely. Zero didn't like getting even small details wrong and worked on fine-tuning its assessments constantly. But, overall, Zero was still accurate. It was certainly dead on the money in this instance. Quatre could feel the demand shaping itself in Trowa's mind, the arguments he would use to persuade the healer. But if Trowa was starting the conversation with a reasonable question, maybe he could be persuaded in turn, and the scene between them would be less... ugly. Though not less painful. No, nothing would help that.

The thoughts and feelings had flickered through Quatre's enhanced mind in a fraction of a second, while he was still drawing breath to answer the question.

"Get rid of Zero? No. It is too... " Quatre searched for words to explain the symbiotic link that existed between him and the spell, but it only really made sense in the language of mathematical magic. He didn't want to get bogged down in details, anyway. "No, it’s not possible."

Trowa's fingers slowly clenched into a fist. His face was almost completely turned away.

Quatre wondered what Trowa would say now. Zero immediately started to compute the most likely options-

_[Program ‘Probability Tree'- Abort.]_

He didn't think knowing would help.

Zero still ran a few programs in the background, putting the equations through different modules; it wanted to be sure Quatre knew how to respond in the unlikely event the shaman grew violent. It wouldn't risk any injury to its carrier. Apart from that, it respected Quatre's wishes and the Abort command, and let the future arrive at its own pace.

"Shortly after you got infected with this m- um, thing, you said that the less you used it, the less it would harm you." Trowa had tripped slightly over one word, but otherwise he remained remarkably collected. Trowa wasn't the kind to lose his temper. Zero, who didn't respect anybody's attempts to remain calm, informed Quatre that the most likely word that Trowa had been about to use (estimated at 89% probability), had been 'monstrosity'.

Quatre waited. Trowa stirred, and took a deep breath. He appeared to suddenly remember he still had his crossbow in his hand. He put it down on the desk with a thump. The strain that he kept out of his voice was obvious in the force of the gesture, causing the nearby mortar and pestle to jump. Trowa breathed out slowly through his nose, then reached out and carefully put the mortar back in its exact place, using the clear ring left in the dust as a guide.

"I know you've been forced to use it by circumstances," he said just as carefully and precisely. "You've had to counter Duo's manipulations, then Fen approached us, and then the herald attacked us... but now you've given us a fairly good strategy to counter Juusan. Heero, Duo and Wufei will take it from here. I think you should stop using it now. Or at least, cut back on using it quite so much."

"Why?"

Trowa spun around to face him. "Why?! You're changing! It's getting- I don't think you realize how much this thing is changing you."

"And is change such a bad thing?" Quatre asked reasonably.

"In this case, yes," Trowa said firmly.

"Really? Is there anything I did since I obtained Zero that you disapprove of?"

Trowa hesitated, obviously caught short by the question. His aura became introverted, probably rifling his memories for a concrete example of what must seem so obvious to him.

"What you did with Fen, for instance. I know, you say he'd have betrayed us sooner or later, but to just let - no, to manipulate Duo into giving him the stone back like that, just to see what Fen would do- and you didn't warn us, Quatre. That was a very dangerous situation-"

"We will all be in a much more dangerous one in a few months," Quatre answered neutrally. "I'd rather know now that Wufei, Heero and Duo can spontaneously put aside their differences and work as something like a team, and they needed to know it too; particularly Duo. Besides, Fen has Zero as well. If I'd told any of you what I suspected about his reactions, you'd have been expecting his attack, and that would have shown in the way you moved, thought, and acted. He'd have read it in your lines, and it would have spoiled the... "

"Experiment," Trowa supplied icily, when Quatre paused to search for the best word to use. That had been the word Zero had suggested. Zero had no emotions, no needs and no desires, except to minimize harm to Quatre and give him the most control over any given situation. Even this one. It saw no need to sugar-coat the truth and drag out the argument, and it was probably right.

"Yes. Experiment. Is that your only problem with my decisions these past few months?"

"No! Quatre, it's not- this thing is-... " Trowa grimaced and ran a hand through the fall of bangs. "The way you- you used S as bait yesterday-"

"I thought we'd been over that already. I gave you my rationale, and I didn't hear you suggest any workable alternative. You accepted my reasons for my actions at the time."

"Yes, but... " Trowa looked lost. His good eye was searching Quatre's face with something more and more like desperation.

Quatre took a deep breath. End it. End it now.

"'But'? But they are not reasons you want to hear. You would accept that kind of hard logic from Duo, from Wufei or Heero, even from S himself. But not from me."

The shaman stared at him for a few seconds. Quatre saw Trowa's aura flare with a burst of intuition, his mind feeling the shape of what Quatre was leading to. But Trowa shook his head abruptly, rejecting the start of a strand of thought that he wouldn't accept.

"Zero has warped your way of thinking. I can see it in your lines. Most of the time, they're not too bad, but sometimes I see them change in ways I can barely understand- those occasions are just plain alarming!"

No, Quatre thought with self-directed annoyance, those occasions are just plain slip-ups. A lapse in my concentration, where I let you see more than you should.

"I know it's not made you delusional," Trowa continued bitterly. "You don't need to throw that in my teeth anymore, thank you. But it's made you... harder. Colder."

"Yes, it has. Also more effective. More powerful. Able to help. Maybe, if I'd had Zero-"

Quatre's resigned calm suddenly shattered under an unexpected wave of self-directed anger and guilt. He glared at their bed, and ground out: "Maybe if I'd had Zero from the start, I wouldn't have sat there like a gentle, weak, well-meaning lump of blond goodness and let Duo put his mark of control on me. Hell, forget Zero. If I'd been just that bit more cautious, if I'd been stronger, more suspicious, I wouldn't have ended up nearly disemboweling you with a mage bolt on Duo's orders-"

"Quatre-"

"I am not going to stop using it." Quatre rubbed his eyes, trying to get rid of the vision of his own hand rising against his will, power gathering, aimed at Trowa who was rushing towards him, intent only on protecting his lover... the helplessness... the fury... the pain, as the bolt smashed into his One and Only, his heart and soul. The agony echoing up their bond to hammer into Quatre until he thought he would die with Trowa, and oh God, how he'd wanted to... But Duo had needed them still, so he'd had Quatre dampen the blast. Quatre himself had had absolutely nothing to do with that small mercy. He'd had no control over any of it!

Quatre blinked away the past and focused once more on the present. Zero obediently came back with an analysis of Trowa's lines and thoughts, and a quick read of the future probable ways this conversation might head. Quatre interrupted Trowa just as the shaman opened his mouth.

"Don't say it. Yes, I know it's not really my fault. I was just a handy tool, and Duo used me. Since I've obtained Zero, I am the one who has been using him. And no. I can see what you are thinking, Trowa. But no, Zero is not ‘taking me over'. It's not manipulating my friends through me without my consent. It's a spell. A complex one, but a spell nonetheless. It has no more self-will than a hammer. It gives me different ways to shape the future, but I am the one who makes the decisions, and though I wish some of them had been kinder, I regret none of them. And I do not regret the changes I've had to go through, to better use this spell. Center is also my home. I will not let millions die. I will not let the Scourge have his way if I can help it."

Trowa's moon-touched eye was boring into Quatre, trying to read his lines. Not that he could. He'd been unable to read them for months, though Quatre had kept up a semblance of his old patterns on the surface so that his lover would not be too alarmed by this.

"Can you believe me?" Quatre asked him straight, voice tense and hard.

Trowa started to say something, then stopped, eyes narrowing at the choice of words. ‘Can you believe me', not ‘do you'.

Quatre gathered his strategic abilities, and said the words that had to be said, the mathematically precise words that were like the small, well-thrown stones that started an avalanche.

"Can you believe that I am controlling Zero, and not the other way around? Or is it easier for you to believe that I am a delicate healer who is being overtaken by some kind of spell with a will of its own. You're a shaman, Trowa, and you know the limits of magic as well as I do, you know that's not actually possible. But does it make it easier? To think this is something you can save me from? That you can rip it from my mind and I'll return to being your gentle Quatre? Your child-lover happily following you around, easy to predict, and control, and protect?"

"Quatre... "

The nascent protest died on Trowa's lips. The green eye widened.

The avalanche started, memories tumbling into a new light, false perceptions falling away, hard, ugly truths crashing through the mind like massive boulders.

Quatre watched, with some sadness, as the shaman's gaze turned inwards...

...and realized that Quatre was right. Entirely, wholly, cruelly right. 

The empath mentally recoiled from the jarring pain and self-doubt that ripped through the normally confident mind. Zero tried to help him, but even its suggestion to seal off the pain was a bit weak. It knew its owner well enough now to know that Quatre would feel the pain sooner or later, and to its full. Quatre cast around for a way of cushioning the self-realization shaking Trowa's mind, instinctively, like one caught a child who had stumbled.

"You see it now. But don't-... I don't blame you, it's not wrong... " Quatre looked for words - words were so heavy, so useless.

Trowa looked up at him, his eyes wounded, lost, self-disgust starting to churn in their depths. Quatre hugged himself, looked away and tried again.

"I love you, Trowa. I love you for what you are, but also because you protect and care for me, because you are someone so much more worldly and experienced. And you do love me for who I am, but also because I am someone you can cherish and protect. It's natural, it's perfectly human. But I can't be that any more. Can you see that?" He looked at his lover beseechingly. Wanting him to understand all of it, and stop hurting so much. "I would if I could, but we cannot afford it. I cannot stand idly by when I can act. I'm sorry. I know this hurts you. But I think it's better for us both if we put some distance between each other. I-... "

It had been remarkably easy to say. But the sudden flare of agony in Trowa's eyes still caught him short, even though he'd predicted every facet of it.

"I have other things to do, more changes... " to be exact, more potential slip-ups that would reveal to a concerned and protective shaman more than Quatre wanted him to know. "I don't think you want to be around me for what follows. And, to be quite honest... "

Quatre hesitated, but cruel honesty and a clean break would be better for both of them in the long run. His voice was quieter when he spoke again, the hesitation lost.

"To be quite honest, Trowa, there is nothing that you can do here anymore. You have nowhere near the power to oppose Juusan. And your desire to protect me is dangerous and distracting. It's putting you needlessly at risk, and I find myself making allowances for your actions in my strategies that I should not have to make. I can do so, Zero can incorporate your presence in my tactical programs, it's been doing so from the start. But Zero fears what my concern -my love for you is doing for my detachment. And some of the things I'll have to do in the future-... I think it would be easier for both of us if you were not here any more, when I use Zero against Juusan."

Quatre turned away. Logically, he should stay and argue it out, and make sure Trowa fully understood the situation. The part of Quatre that was as detached as Zero wanted him to be argued for this approach. But he'd have to hope his lover could figure it out for himself, because right now, even with his empathy nearly quelled, the ripping tearing pain and self-doubt ringing off of Trowa just hurt too much. He headed blindly towards the door.

There was an indrawn breath behind him. Quatre shook his head swiftly and reached for the knob. He didn't want to argue any more.

_[Proximity alert - violence calculated as unlikely (3.2%)]_

Trowa's arm slammed across the exit, barring Quatre's escape. Despite Zero's warning, Quatre still started back, alarmed. The shaman could move as fast as a panther when he wanted to.

"Tro-... "

Quatre stared.

Trowa's aura was in chaos. Anger, directed at himself and at Quatre, pain, self recrimination, loss, resentment, sorrow... But the look on his face was one of steely determination. It was slowly leeching into his lines, fighting the anarchy and the helplessness.

"Very well. Use Zero."

The words were clipped, firm.

Quatre took another step back, away from this unexpected turn of events. Zero automatically rallied to Quatre's surprise.

_[Possibility of anger was calculated at 65%, pain at 98%, resentment at 44% -]_

Quatre had known that. But those numbers were just a theory, and he'd thought - he had wanted to think that Trowa would rise above cold logic and calculations. This reaction was petty, coming from Trowa.

"What are you saying? You're washing your hands of me?"

"I'd sooner rip out my soul," Trowa answered softly.

He leaned heavily against the door frame with one arm still across the exit, but he was no longer looking at Quatre. His gaze was turned inward, as if he were reading something from his own lines he'd never seen before.

"Yes. I love the fact that you are young, innocent and gentle, that you prefer to avoid violence," Trowa said abruptly after a silence crawled between them. "I find it precious. I was not just protecting you from physical harm all this time. I wanted to keep you from losing that. I love that part of you. A bit more than I should.”

That admission hung between them like a knife, and then Trowa’s eyes fastened on Quatre’s. 

"But it's not why I love _you._ "

Trowa tilted his head; the fall of his hair uncovered both his eyes, one burning green with emotion, the other a cooler white.

"The man I love is a battlefield. That gentleness and innocence fighting against his need to do something, to protect and help the people he loves, to make the world better. I've seen you fight with yourself over every man who's attacked us. I've seen you torn every time I've had to kill to protect our lives. I've seen you accept the necessity without blaming either of us for it, with a maturity beyond your years. I never... really thought about it that much. Maybe in part because I was... ashamed. I was the one to put you into these situations. There have been times I tried to leave you behind so you didn't have to face these things, or see the blood I spilled. But in the end, I always let you persuade me to keep you by my side, whatever the danger. And I always wondered why I let you talk me into it. And now I know. Do you?"

Quatre knew why. He could see the lines of thought unfolding in Trowa's mind; they were discovering them together, as it were. Trowa had probably never questioned the emotions he felt towards his lover. He just accepted them, the good and the selfish together, with no more thought than an animal protecting its mate. But Quatre's words had ripped away a lot of the comfortable illusions and self-centered needs that all love involved. The feelings that were left were now pared down to the bone.

Now, Quatre could see a new pattern emerging. His eyes were wide, his mind - and Zero - silenced. The new structure rose from the ashes of what he'd destroyed, and both he and Trowa were just now realizing that it had always been there, underpinning everything.

He knew what Trowa was about to say, but he didn't interrupt. Sometimes, words needed to be said.

"I let you follow me, each and every time, because I trust your strength. If that bloody Zero ever told you I thought you were weak-minded, or just plain weak, then I'm really getting worried about that piece of junk," Trowa stated, lips rising in a briefly feral expression. "If I'd really believed you were that fragile, I would never have allowed you to follow me out of that cloister where they'd walled you up in the first place.

"Quatre, I've seen you battle death itself. Plunge so deeply into a dying man's body I was afraid you would never come back to me, but I let you do it because that was your battle, and your strength. You followed me, away from your old, comfortable life without ever complaining. You stood at the sidelines and let me fight without putting yourself at risk and distracting me. Always at my back, ready with a shield or a bolt, even though you would have rather avoided the path of violence where my line took us. You were always there."

Trowa's arm fell away from the door frame. He crossed them over his chest and took a deep breath, his eyes closing briefly. When he opened them, his gaze was firm. It spoke of anguish, but also of faith.

"I'm not asking you to give up Zero, if you do not want to. I'm not asking you to stay defenseless if you have a weapon that can make a difference. I was worried that Zero was changing you against your will, because your lines have been very contradictory of late. That is to say, what I could see of your lines looked pretty contradictory. I get the feeling you've been hiding them from me even more than I assumed." Quatre got caught in the heat of a sharp glare, which faltered into resignation.

"No matter, I guess. If I can't trust you to explain it to me in a way that I can understand, then I'll just damn well trust you blind. Either way, I won't leave. Not to spare my feelings, and certainly not for Zero's bloody convenience or whatever stupid-" Trowa shut his mouth, his lips thinning. He took a breath and started again, his voice lower and calmer. "I trust you. Alright? Don't make me leave. You made your point. I understand it, and I accept it. I can't protect you any more. So I'll not put myself at risk, I'll try not to distract you, and if I can be of any help, however small, at least I'll be here. I want to keep our lines parallel, until the very last moment, until the wheel turns. If you can no longer follow and support my line... then I guess it's my turn to support and follow yours. Wherever you go."

Trowa's words ended in a simple monotone, as if the emotions were too big to make it into them.

Quatre was silent for awhile. He was having an internal argument with a rather confused Zero.

_[Recalibrate, dammit!]_

"Quatre?" Trowa looked hesitant to interrupt, but his worry must have finally won out.

"Zero has hit a limitation," Quatre muttered. "And it's one I knew of. I should have seen this coming."

" ...What?"

"Zero is a tool of war, and that colors what it can do, how it operates," Quatre explained, rubbing his face slowly, trying to sort out his sudden understanding into mundane words. "It doesn't comprehend human emotions that don't fit into that context. In fact, to be on the safe side, it treats all feelings as pitfalls, as things that can hurt me. It classifies people as either threats, tools or somebody who might limit my ability to anticipate and manipulate the future. It thinks that love is an insidious emotion that allows another person to influence and control you, even harm you." Quatre snorted and let his hand fall. "To be honest, even after making allowances for Zero's interference... I am not entirely sure it's wrong about that."

Trowa looked at him thoughtfully for a minute, his eyes flickering over Quatre's face, still trying to instinctively read his lines. Then he sighed, and a ghost of a smile twisted his lips. "If S were here, he would say that 'Only the wind is completely free, and that's because it has no home'. Love doubles your chances of getting hurt, yes, it is a weakness of sorts. And it’s everything we have and more. It’s what we want to be strong in order to defend."

Quatre tried to smile. He couldn't. This wasn't the time for humor; this was the time to face some hard truths, for both the shaman and himself.

"I will change, Trowa." His voice was harsher than he'd wanted it, but even Zero couldn't catch words once they'd tumbled from the future into the past. Quatre closed his eyes. "I have already changed more than you think," he admitted, forcing it out. "I might become someone you don't know anymore. I might become someone you don't love."

"Only if you lose the battle," Trowa whispered. He wasn't talking about Juusan.

Quatre opened his eyes and fixed his lover sternly. "And if that's needed to win the war? I will do it, you know. Can you accept that?"

Trowa didn't even flinch. "I might have to die too, to save Center. You know this, you accepted it from the start, and never quailed."

"Yes," Quatre sighed. "But if I have to do this-... I won't be dead, Trowa. Not physically. I won't be gone, but I'll be changed beyond recognition. If you stay till the end... that will make it hard for you to mourn me and move on."

"Good," Trowa answered softly. "Then I won't move on. I'll stick around, in the hopes that one day, you'll come back to me."

"Then you've got the worse end of the deal," Quatre countered, his voice hard and uncompromising. He would not accept any ambiguity about this. "If you died, I would mourn you, probably for a long time. But I would ultimately get on with my life. To have you hang around after a ghost, a mere memory wearing my body, with none of my mind remaining... that hardly seems fair to you."

"Really? I don't see it that way. I see myself as very fortunate."

Quatre stared at him.

Trowa smiled. "I might have never met you at all," he explained simply.

"You might have been better o-"

The hand covered his mouth with almost bruising force.

"Don't say that," Trowa told him, his voice suddenly as hard as Quatre's. " _Never_ say that."

Quatre stared at him above the hand on his mouth. Trowa took a breath to add something, then realized he was nearly gagging his lover, and jerked his hand away, with the start of an apology - Quatre caught it in his fingers, gently. Then he gathered the other hand. He looked steadily at the long fingers; the pads callused almost to the point of horn from drawing back the strings of bow and crossbow, nicks and cuts on the knuckles.

They'd talked, and that was something they had to do, but now words were no longer enough. They were at the nexus of several possible futures. One was the one that Zero advocated. It was simple, straightforward. The pain would be searing, but brief, and then there was nothing but duty and complete control of the future and himself.

The other... might also hurt. Considerably more. But maybe what was most frightening was that this future did not lie entirely in Quatre's hands. Part of it was entirely out of his control. Quatre had seen his own death repeatedly in Zero's mirror, but this path into uncertainty was more terrifying yet. If he walked this line, then a part of him would always rest in these strong, scarred hands. There was no doubt in his mind that he had to go that far, if this was the path he chose; Trowa had said he'd trust Quatre blindly, but that would be unfair. Trowa didn't deserve to have no trust in return for his own.

Zero whirred a bit in the back of Quatre's mind. It still preferred the simplest way forward, but it admitted that it had a bug in its ability to understand certain human emotions unrelated to war, and that it lacked the capacity to properly calculate the parameters of a relationship. If Quatre was willing to give it a complement of information, it could build a computational module to get around that limitation.

_[Estimated time: 8 months, 3 days, +- 10 days. Required Information would be -]_  
_[Abort]_

Quatre made his choice. He lifted Trowa's weathered hands to his face.

Trowa looked puzzled. Quatre laid the shaman's fingers against his forehead, brushing aside a blond lock. This would be easier if the moon were shining, or if Trowa had some ocher and a magic circle, but if Quatre opened his mind, then the shaman should be able to read his lines with nothing but his mind and his fingers.

"Quatre? What are you-"

Trowa's fingers touched the spot which corresponded to Quatre's Third Eye, at the same time the healer, with grim determination, dropped the shields he'd kept over his true lines for the past few months.

The fingers went rigid. Trowa choked and jerked away, but Quatre held on bleakly. The shaman sagged back against the door frame, gasping, eyes wide and blind.

Quatre said nothing. After a few seconds, the strangled breaths grew more even as Trowa recovered from the shock. Maybe I should have warned him, Quatre thought. But he hadn't. Maybe it was finally time they both stopped trying to protect one another. Maybe it was time they both started to trust each other's strengths, rather than compensate for the others' weaknesses.

Trowa shook his head, as if that could change what he was seeing, or get it to make sense. The shock was ebbing. His mind tentatively felt around, trying to understand; Quatre could feel it, like a feather touch right in his head. The Third Eye was what allowed humans to sense the future, mainly by basing themselves on past experience and minute observations of the present so small they weren't aware of them, a minuscule imitation of Zero. Normally it extended to a few seconds ahead. In seers, it extended a few days or hours, darting occasionally forward a few months, in an uncontrollable way.

In Quatre, however... Trowa must have thought he was touching a puddle, to find himself sinking into the depths of a bottomless sea. Quatre's Third Eye was huge. Some areas reached out to the future to such a distance that it would crush the human mind to fully perceive it. Quatre kept a shield up around that, and it wasn't only for Trowa's benefit. He didn't go there either, not without Zero's assistance.

The fingers caught within Quatre's flexed, and tried to move away. Quatre let them. Trowa's eyes were closed now, a line of pain and deepening confusion on his brow as his fingers searched more and more frantically for-

Quatre touched the strong hands again. They tried to escape his, agitated, but he persisted, guiding them.

Trowa wasn't a spirit healer like some of the other Nightwalkers, but he knew the basics of the craft, like all of his kin. When a seer's Third Eye went too deep, saw too far, it unbalanced the rest of his aura. It meant self-absorption, confusion, retreat from the present, even madness. Trowa's fingers were tracing a pattern known to any shaman who'd had to treat a seer who couldn't awake from the Dreaming. He was trying to find the Ground Cords, the lines that helped the mind stay anchored and focused in the present. In bad cases of a seer going insane, those lines were tattered, sometimes even absent.

Quatre moved the fingers a bit more to the sides of his forehead. Finally, those shamanistic books Trowa had made him read were coming in handy after all. He knew some of the names of what Trowa was looking for, and why.

He let his touch and his mind do the talking. Here... here is what you are looking for.

Trowa's fingers stopped and felt about, as if the lines he was looking for were palpable. He stiffened again. Quatre could imagine what he was thinking. The Ground Cords were nowhere near where they should be; Quatre's Third Eye was so big, it had shoved them away. But because he had Zero, they were not broken. Zero had reinforced them and lengthened them to an abnormal degree, so that Quatre could still be effective in the real world with the predictions from the future. To Trowa, it must feel as unnatural as eye stalks sprouting from Quatre's forehead, or something equally as loathsome and strange. There was a good deal of distress in Trowa's aura, and Quatre could do very little about that.

The green and white eye flew open. The hands tore away from Quatre's. Trowa hugged himself, staring at the healer. Quatre didn't have to try very had to read Trowa's mind. It was a muddle of confusion, considerable awe, and a good dose of disgust and fear.

Quatre waited. He wondered if he looked calm. He didn't feel it. He'd barely shown Trowa anything yet, and already the fear was there.

That's why you've been hiding from him all this time, isn't it? The question didn't come from anywhere near Zero. Quatre's heart threw this at him, as it challenged him to confront his own true feelings, as Trowa had done earlier.

Yes. He was afraid. He hadn't wanted to show Trowa how much he'd changed, because he was afraid of frightening his lover so badly that he'd never have a chance of winning him back, even if he survived defeating Juusan. And that was when he realized that, whatever Zero had had to say about a relationship, part of Quatre had always hoped he'd be able to keep a chance, however slim, to rebuild their relationship, despite ripping them apart and chasing him away in the first place.

And more than that. Quatre touched the root of his fear. He had wanted Trowa away so that the shaman would not see the very lines that Quatre was now showing him. Quatre didn't want to be forced to see, through Trowa's eyes, how changed he'd become. He'd talked boldly about accepting the changes Zero imposed, but he was afraid of actually seeing how inhuman he'd become; afraid to see Trowa recoil from a monster.

In his field of vision, narrowed by fear and an irrational curdle of shame... two hands reached out and picked up his own again, turned around so that they were lying in his palms. The long fingers were taut with stress, the scars stood out across the whitened knuckles.

Trowa was staring at him. His aura was still a mess, but that determination was back, slicing through it all, and this time, it had realized exactly the hurdles it had to face.

"Show me," Trowa whispered.

Quatre could feel the slightest tremor in the hands he held. Trowa, it appeared, was braver than he was. Or maybe just more ignorant, Zero speculated, before Quatre told it to shut up. Not that the program was entirely wrong. But that wasn't the point. Just because Trowa couldn't begin to understand how much he'd changed probably didn't stop him from imagining the worst. At this point, Trowa must think there was nothing recognizable left.

A sudden thought made Quatre smile slightly. Of course. That's what he would show him next. He wondered if Trowa would recall this...

He pressed Trowa's palms together, and drew them back to his forehead. He placed Trowa's joined fingers higher on his forehead, above the Third Eye, touching blond curls and his Crown Chakra.

Trowa let out a short puff of air; Quatre had felt him brace for the worst. Instead... Trowa let out a weak chuckle. The memory danced between them, like warm sunlight in a clinic three years ago.

"How did you know I was an empath?" The eighteen-year-old healer asked, startled, of his guest - one of the infamous Nightwalkers, but actually Mr Barton was quite nice, Quatre had decided. And he knew all sorts of herbs that Quatre had never heard of.

"I can see it."

"What? How?"

"Here."

Trowa Barton leaned forward and touched Quatre high on the forehead. The healer started back with a surprised squeak; Trowa had been his guest for two weeks and this was the first time the man had touched him deliberately. His fingers felt warm.

"This energy node in your pattern is known as your Crown Chakra. It is a manifestation of your higher feelings and abilities. I can't see many details without Walking your lines, but just looking at it, I can see that you're compassionate, intelligent, and also empathic," the shaman explained with a smile. He had turned to look at the fire, kindly ignoring the blush that was invading the healer's face.

"You're still compassionate," Trowa whispered. "And intelligent. And... " he frowned a bit in concentration, his eyes closing, "actually, your empathy feels a bit rusty."

Quatre shook his head, and was about to launch into an explanation about how he'd hotwired his senses together to help him read the future, before realizing it would make for a very complicated three-hour lecture. Talking wasn't necessary at this point, anyway. He sent a flash of thought thrilling up Trowa's fingers, into his mind; it illustrated the link between the Crown Chakra and Quatre's Third Eye.

"Oh." Trowa looked a bit doubtful about that setup, but his fingers were still caressing the blond locks, feeling every aspect of the Crown Chakra. It hadn't been changed much; it probably felt reassuringly familiar.

Trowa licked his lips, and his eyes focused on Quatre's. He was silent for awhile, and then he nodded shortly.

"Show me more.”

Quatre held his gaze for a few moments, but Trowa didn't look away. He moved his hands to cover Quatre's hair, smoothing it down absently, and looked at the healer expectantly.

With a sense of release, relief, and resolve equal to his fear, Quatre slowly began to reveal the lines that moved him now.

All of them.

Trowa's mouth twisted and his eyes shut tightly, as his fingers and mind felt the edge of the abyss.

Faint threads of panic shot through his aura. Quatre blinked, and tried to soothe them away with his mind. Too much, overwhelming. He had to- he had to expose this logically, he had to give it some kind of order, or it would only be an insane, frightening jumble to Trowa. How could he... ?

He let go of Trowa's hands. He cupped Trowa's face, caressed the tawny hair away from the tightly shut eyes until he'd caught the shaman's attention, then he placed his smaller hands on Trowa's head.

Here. We can start here. Go slow. Let me show you.

Trowa froze. He stayed still for a few seconds, then slowly he nodded. Permission, and acknowledgment. When Quatre started to move his hands and mind along Trowa's pattern, the shaman imitated him, following his lead.

A few months ago, the world had exploded into dazzling arrays of lines, as Zero opened his eyes to them. Quatre had wanted to see everything, touch everything. But that first night, when he'd touched Trowa like this, Zero had shown its true colors. It was a tool of war. It had warped the innocent touch, the intimacy, and showed him instead how they could be used as weapons. He'd not touched Trowa this way since. Except some times, at night, when his lover slept by his side. Quatre had tentatively touched some of his minor lines, careful not to invade Trowa's privacy, or give Zero any fodder for its cruel equations.

But he had to move beyond fear. Now his fingers moved freely over Trowa's pattern.

Below the Crown Chakra lay the first branch of the Tree of Life. Quatre didn't need physical contact to see this; Zero had given him vision that went way beyond needing to touch anything, but touch he did anyway, marveling in the fine details that he'd never quite appreciate the same way otherwise. The branch was rich with Trowa's strength of will, his calm, serious nature, his commitment to Center. It glowed in Quatre's eyes as he caressed it, his fingers tracing the lines over Trowa's brow at the same time. Quatre found himself smiling.

Trowa imitated his gesture, still cautious after his shock with the Third Eye. A callus caught in a wisp of blond hair, tugged a bit before giving. The panic and worry in Trowa's aura started to fade. Quatre's first branch had changed very little, besides a new determination to never be used again, and to serve Center in a more active role. The shaman rubbed Quatre's temples briefly with the pads of his thumbs as he finished reading the first branch. The gesture felt soothing. Maybe he had felt a flicker of Quatre's own fear and doubt...

The hands settled, the fingers flexed.

Show me more...

Quatre traced Trowa's second branch of the Tree, dipping down to deeper lines of spirit and mind. He felt the body near his own shiver as he explored.

Trowa's mind stumbled and reached blindly. Quatre waited patiently. The fingers pressed to his face as if trying to gain an anchor. They brushed Quatre's lines and his hair. They caressed his Astral Body and his lips. They touched the marred remnants of his spiritual faith, rather shaken by all the recent events, and the folds of his eyelids. They stroked the overgrown Fifth Chakra and the curve of his throat.

That thread of fear/hurt/worry was back in Trowa's aura. What he was tracing was only remotely familiar now. Hell, it probably didn't even look human to him.

"How... how does-how can you still-"

Quatre's fingers ghosted over Trowa's lips. The shaman fell silent. His hands were trembling, and Quatre tasted a hint of wonder and of fear, of pain, regret, longing and determination, all blending and swirling before his mind's eye, under his fingertips. He passed his thumb over Trowa's lips again - not following any particular pattern; just because he felt like it.

Trowa was still for a few seconds, as if trying to integrate and understand what he'd just seen. Then pressure against Quatre's fingers relayed his lover's slow nod.

More. Show me more.

Quatre's hands and mind led the way over Trowa's life pattern. He was still afraid, but he wisely decided to enjoy the feel of his lover's lines while he could, the warmth and the intimacy of touching him like this. He concentrated on the simple pleasure of Trowa's hands moving over his face, skull and throat, and let the future arrive at its own pace.

Trowa was moving with slowly growing confidence. To a shaman, Quatre's lines probably looked like a rampant, chaotic machine gone awry, but now, Trowa was discovering order in the apparent anarchy. The shaman was used to reading patterns from the smallest insect to the mighty ley-lines of Center; he was picking up the new order that regulated Quatre and Zero, faster than Quatre had ever imagined.

The exploration and new understanding came at a price, though. Quatre opened one eye to peek at his lover, worried at the signs of stress growing in Trowa's aura. The shaman was leaning heavily against the door frame now; his eyes screwed shut as if he were protecting them from a blinding light. What was easy - almost too easy at times - for Quatre to do was arduous work for a shaman without the light of the moon for assistance. 

Then Trowa's fingers, following the path Quatre was drawing on his body, tripped over the first real hurdle after the Third Eye. The complex mess that Zero had made of Quatre's Focal Point.

Quatre froze, his hand pressed to the same spot on Trowa's body. In the real world, it corresponded to the little dip just above the joint of the collar bones. Under the healer's fingers, Trowa's Focal Point was simple, almost primal. Quatre's had always been more complex, but now it must look completely neurotic, if not downright incomprehensible.

He waited. To a shaman, this muddle must look almost obscene, a massive rift with nature. He waited for rejection. Trowa's mind was trembling with something like horror, but his fingers continued to press against the tiny dip, almost bruising hard at some point, as if he could reach in there and just rip it out-...He was swaying now, his face had gone pale. He was concentrating so much, he probably hadn't even noticed the beads of sweat trickle down his face. Quatre watched him. He knew his own fear of rejection colored his aura, but he didn't try to hide it.

Trowa's lips moved. Quatre read the words automatically: 'What the hell... '. Ah, he'd found it. The massive railroad that led from Quatre's Focal Point to Zero's pattern. Trowa shook his head again, but this time in something like wonder. Quatre closed his eyes and checked the shaman's progress. He was beginning to understand how it all fit together. It was as if Quatre's pattern had been blown apart and scattered, to make room for Zero. But though it was greater than before, and connected by artificial constructs, the overall scheme of things... was still Quatre. He was the one controlling the spell. Not the other way around. Trowa's mind was probing Zero's I/O system like one prods a wild tiger in its cage. Zero ignored him with sublime indifference.

Quatre smiled for no reason he could readily name, and opened his eyes. He dropped his hands from their own exploration to grip Trowa by the shoulders. A few judicious pokes and shoves, and he managed to nudge his lover sideways, away from the doorframe which was probably trying to make a permanent imprint into his spine. Trowa stumbled, eyes still shut, almost unaware, deep in the complex tangle that was the Zero/Quatre interface. Quatre steadied him, then he pushed down on his shoulders. Trowa stayed leaning against the wall for a few seconds, body stiff and resisting. Finally he sank down, Quatre guiding him somewhat until the shaman was sitting with his back to the wall, eyes still shut, his legs before him. Quatre bent forward, so that Trowa didn't lose his contact with the healer's body. He followed Trowa down to the floor a bit awkwardly, until his knees touched the ground on either side of Trowa's thighs. He settled them both as comfortably as he could and put his hand back on Trowa's Focal Point.

Trowa's eyes were still screwed shut, and Quatre wasn't sure he'd even noticed the change in position. He was looking confused. The complexity of Zero and the changes made to Quatre at this level were probably beyond him. He would need Zero himself to understand them.

Quatre slowly moved his own hand, until it reached Trowa's Fourth Chakra, his astral Heart, in the center of his sternum. He pressed slowly, dragging Trowa's attention back to what he was doing. He didn't force his lover to leave what he was studying, though. He waited patiently for Trowa to decide what he wanted to do.

The shaman's mind finally dropped away from Quatre's Focal Point, still confused and unsure about what he'd seen there. But he let himself be guided, and moved his hand to Quatre's Heart Chakra.

Trowa suddenly smiled, his aura suffusing with relief and a muted joy that seemed to tremble like a heartbeat beneath Quatre's fingers. Quatre thrummed with reflected pleasure; he knew what Trowa had found - what Quatre had found too in his lover’s heart, mirroring his own. Quatre's Fourth Chakra was different, changed and modulated by his overall pattern and Zero's modifications, and the recent events in his life. But one part of that pattern that had blossomed almost four years ago had not changed, and Quatre knew now that it never would, even if Trowa left him, even if his lover died... even if Quatre died for that matter. Fuck the wheel, it couldn't touch this.

"That's rather blasphemous, my love," Trowa murmured with a wisp of a laugh, catching the thought.

Quatre shrugged, knowing Trowa would feel the movement under his palm, and the sentiments expressed in his aura. His lover was deep within him now, following strands of Quatre's thoughts and emotions. Quatre didn't stop him. He encouraged him, moving his hand over Trowa's chest to his heart. He relished the familiar beat beneath his fingers for a few seconds, before moving on.

The Twin Circles, the Thread of Life, the Soul Anchors, the Male-Female Poles, the Fire Chakra... Each mystical point tingled beneath fingers drawn to explore, to discover and share.

Quatre led them, discovering subtle new twists in Trowa's pattern that even Zero's far-reaching vision had missed. He revealed his own pattern by increments under Trowa's touch. He didn't try to hide anything. Neither did he throw the worst at Trowa in a deliberate test of his resolve, daring him to stay no matter what. Trowa's fingers discovered by themselves the massive changes: the edge of cruelty the Jishin spell had taught Quatre; the programs that ran part of his psyche now; the seal, that cut off part of his heart to give him detachment; the dance of madness at the back of his mental layout... Quatre just moved on. The changes, good and bad, fell into place into the overall pattern.

While he caressed the base of Trowa's Silver Cord, his thumb drawing lazy circles around Trowa's navel, his free hand rose to his lover's face. He combed aside the long hair clinging to the forehead, damp with sweat. The shaman's eyes were open now, but completely blind; he was plunged deep into Quatre's pattern. Quatre let his fingers run down Trowa's nose, caress his cheek, slip gently between his parted lips, obscurely fascinated by it all, as if he were touching his lover for the first time.

I think, Quatre concluded, that I am a little high on arcane energy right now.

Zero posted a comment from somewhere within Quatre's reasoning ability. A little warning: if the sanctuary was attacked now, it would take both of them several precious minutes to untangle their psyches and get back to the real world.

Quatre could feel Trowa's pattern flinch and change, his mind suddenly aware of Zero's alien voice communicating with Quatre. The healer sent Zero a curt order to keep a wary eye out for intruders and otherwise mind its own business. But he didn't try to hide the spell from Trowa's mystical gaze. Zero was also a part of him now.

He started tracing patterns across Trowa's lines, like that first night after Zero had taken up residence in his head. Patterns that were strange to the shaman. They weren't based on natural lines, they were Jishin creations. They were artificial, and very invasive- Trowa's hand jerked away from Quatre's abdomen with a protesting grunt.

Quatre reached for the shaman's hand and put it back, though the touch wasn't needed anymore. Still, it was a handy anchor. Trowa was still hesitating, despite the implied permission. Quatre let his fingers and his mind play on Trowa's body and pattern, showing him slowly. You do this... and this... it verifies the harmony of these sets of lines. It indicates the validity of someone's intent. This variant of the tool can also show if someone is lying...

Trowa stood at the start of the pattern, not going forward, until Quatre leaned forward, pressing his lips to his lover's in encouragement. Trowa's tongue darted out absently, testing the sensation he'd probably barely felt. His mind started to walk the Jishin pattern that Quatre had shown him.

Pattern followed pattern. Quatre was distantly aware that his knees were very unhappy with him. After a few seconds, he remembered how to move, and leaned back into Trowa's lap a bit. That just made another set of muscles complain. How long... ? Quatre tipped his head back, focusing his eyes slowly, for the first time in over an hour.

His muscles were a minor inconvenience, he could ignore them. Inside, he felt raw, ripped open and revealed. Trowa's hands trembled, and Quatre realized his own were no better. This was harrowing, like plowing through hundreds of thick webs, while trying to make sense of all of them together.

Finally Trowa stilled.

"Enough," he whispered, his arms abruptly falling away.

Quatre stopped. His hands felt laden. He waited.

Trowa sighed and leaned his head back against the wall. Quatre heard a crick in the shaman's neck and instinctively reached for it with his fingers, a healer's reflex.

"Enough. You... can show me more later... "

Quatre closed his eyes, leaned forward and sank his head onto Trowa's shoulder, drops of sweat peppering the leather jerkin. Later... was a very nice word.

His fingers absently rubbed completely nonsensical patterns down Trowa's neck, kneading the muscles. He moved forward a bit, trying to reduce the angle between their two bodies so he could rest against Trowa more comfortably. Trowa's hand started to brush up and down his back. It had squat to do with shamanistic patterns and everything to do with a gesture of comfort that was as old as humanity.

Their minds were still so entangled in each other's auras that they both turned their heads at the same time. In the real world, their lips met awkwardly. Trowa's eyes were still unfocused and dazed. It was just a touch. It shivered, unsettling but pleasant, over nerves scrapped raw by too much self-revelation. Quatre blinked and set his hand against Trowa's jaw, tilting his head to kiss his lover again.

They'd just been more intimate with each other than humans were really meant to be; the bonds they'd tied between them pulled them closer, melded into something else, more primal, more natural, just as necessary... Quatre's mind brushed Trowa's instinctively, reaching out to touch more of the comfort/warmth/sharing-

Trowa jumped, gasped and slid sideways along the wall until he caught himself.

"Wh-what was that?!"

Quatre, mortified, retreated hastily. He'd sparked off that pattern without conscious volition, he'd just wanted to touch Trowa for pleasure instead of ripping their souls bare-

Trowa caught the fleeing mind as well as the body that was struggling to move away.

"No," he whispered, the word fluttering across Quatre's lips as the shaman leaned forward, away from the wall, and dragged the slender body to him again, "no, no, no... do that again... "

Quatre's higher functions pondered this; they were both exhausted, mentally and physically, and really, they should take the time to reflect on all this, and- then he noticed that his fingers had already sneaked around Trowa's back and dropped to the Basal Chakra where they were contemplating something quite naughty that the shaman had probably never seen before.

Zero issued a few more protests about battle readiness and keeping energy reserves in case they needed to fight off a surprise attack. At the same time, Trowa, apparently puzzled but still willing to imitate Quatre's movements one more time, let his hands slide down Quatre's back, one of them placing itself comfortably on his hip, the other moving to imitate the healer's fingers, resting on his Basal Chakra, near the root of his spine. Energy lines on Quatre's body crackled and sparkled.

Quatre told Zero to take a flying jump.

His nails scratched and probed at Trowa's lower back, hitting pressure points and stroking the lines that led from the Basal Chakra to all sorts of interesting places. Trowa's fingers mimicked his hesitantly, perplexity coloring the shaman's aura. This was a pattern Trowa didn't know; it relied on tools of war, something Zero had taught to Quatre. The healer was quite happily using his knowledge of human anatomy to subvert them to a purpose that Zero's creators had probably not had in mind. His fingers slowed until Trowa caught up with him, and they both completed the pattern just as his lover was about to ask what it was they were doing.

"Whoa!" Trowa's head nearly slammed back into the wall, but Quatre had slipped a hand behind his neck to avoid that, having expected that reaction. Zero had its uses, Quatre thought, just before his mind dissolved. His lower body felt joined to Trowa's in a wave of searing heat and pleasure.

He rocked forward. The pattern he used made everything more sensitive. He could feel every flinch and start of movement against his cock. Trowa groaned, his free hand hard against Quatre's hip, nearly crushing him, exhilarating.

Trowa's hand slipped from the pattern on Quatre's back, but it no longer mattered. Quatre shuddered as the fingers flexed, gripping his ass, pressing their erections together until it felt like they were going to fuse like that.

Quatre, panting, smiled down at the face dazed with bliss, and leaned back a bit, tilting his hips. Trowa blinked, stunned, flushed - Quatre, tantalized, leaned forward, and fell into a wild kiss like a bite. He threw out his free hand to brace against the wall, and keep them from pitching back into it, as trivialities like balance were lost in the writhing, pulsing movement that thrust them together. Trowa's hand on his ass made him writhe and shove and push. Quatre choked - he ripped away from Trowa's mouth - he couldn't get enough air into his lungs - he couldn't get enough! Very, very far away, he saw his other hand slam against the wall, desperately keeping them upright, keeping the pressure, the contact between them, the wild movement of his hips, grinding him against Trowa's cock. Auras tangled; pleasure melded them into a single entity, something primal, mindless - pure -

"Ahh!" The cry broke from his throat. The pattern he'd used to tease and arouse them exploded into little fragments.

Trowa hadn't cried out. He'd buried his head in Quatre's shoulders as he shoved their bodies together one last time. An animal instinct had pressed teeth into the healer's skin, an age-old meaning. Mine. Still mine.

Quatre sagged against him, trembling and panting. One hand left the wall to smooth down Trowa's hair, petting him gently, in a gesture that was just as proprietary as the mild bite on his neck.

A trickle of sweat ran into his eye, stinging. As if that had been a signal, every part of his body that had a justifiable complaint queued up with a petition. Starting with his knees. Quatre groaned. Trowa went Hmmm deep in his throat. It sounded a lot more contented, but of course he was sitting down relatively comfortably.

Quatre made a move to disentangle himself. It was pretty much doomed to failure. They ended up in a limp heap on their sides. Trowa grunted as his shoulder thumped against the flagstones.

"Quatre... ?"

"Hmm?" Quatre tried to move one of his legs out from the tangle. He managed to straighten it in a three-stage movement accompanied by plenty of creaking noises.

" ...What are we doing on the floor?"

"You don't remember?"

"Oh, I remember... but why didn't we do this on the bed? And without our clothes on, I'd add?" Trowa shifted and moved his legs apart, grimacing.

"Lack of foresight. Strangely enough." Quatre frowned, suddenly introduced to another point of discomfort cooling in his pants. Oh yeah, they were still wearing clothes. He'd somehow managed to forget that in the past hour.

Trowa snorted. "Lack of foresight? May I ask what that piece of junk in your head was doing all this time then?"

Quatre started to mentally highlight the lines of thought Zero was following, but then he realized that Trowa could no longer follow them. The climax had blown their patterns apart. An interesting way of coming down from a Nightwalker trance, Quatre thought with a smug grin.

"Do you really want to know what Zero's doing?" he asked sardonically.

"Yes," Trowa whispered. He was still smiling, but his eyes were suddenly serious.

Quatre took in a breath, and let it out again. He turned towards Trowa, propped himself up on his elbow, and examined the shaman's aura. Strange to look at it and feel it from the outside again.

The taint of fear was still there. And a good helping of worry. Trowa didn't like Zero. He was afraid for Quatre. A tiny part of him was afraid _of_ Quatre. Quatre tried to imagine what he had looked like to Trowa; some sort of God-Machine, controlling the future like clockwork, bent on victory at all cost, with uncaring power that could obliterate them all if it needed too. Something alien, against nature.

Trowa's eyes met his, unflinching.

"It's been very busy, actually," Quatre sighed. "It had calculated our break-up as inevitable, mathematically, and that simplified some of its equations. So it's been redoing them. It's trying to ensure that whatever I- we decide to do now, it can compensate for our decision. It's including all possible futures of our relationship in its tactical modules, so that it won't compromise its overall strategy for Juusan's arrival."

There was a moment of silence as Trowa stared at the ceiling.

"Did you just tell me that Zero has given us his blessing?"

"It. It's an it. And trust me, it's not your new mother-in-law. It doesn't know the concept of blessing. Essentially, it's labeled this whole issue as 'your bloody business', and is just making sure it won't cause any negative consequences in our fight with Juusan."

Despite Quatre's attempt at humor, the look they shared was grave. There was an unspoken thread of thought between them; if Zero decided that their relationship definitely impacted their ability to fight the Scourge... then it would have to be put on hold. On hold though. Not over.

"Exactly what is it doing to compensate for our decision?" Trowa grumbled, not looking like he wanted to know, but soldiering on anyway.

"There's not that much impact, really." Strange how little this momentous decision between them really mattered to the outside world... "Mainly, it's making allowances for my desire to avoid putting you at risk, and for any attempt on your part to protect me that might cause interference."

Trowa blinked and turned to look at Quatre angrily. "I said I wouldn't-"

Quatre laid a gentle hand on his mouth. Trowa lapsed into an irritated silence, but Quatre could see he was realizing the logic behind that. He could say he wouldn't be protective, but it was his nature, and they both knew it. It would probably take some time for him to conquer that, to stop thinking of Quatre as someone who needed to be protected. The revelation of what Quatre had become had probably helped a lot, but the rest would be up to Trowa. There was no guarantee that he would succeed, or that Quatre wouldn't relapse and fold back in on himself again, or that their love would be strong enough to keep them together for what would follow. But then again, nothing was ever guaranteed except for death, taxes and Juusan’s arrival in a few months. 

"Zero has dedicated a few of its resources to work on another project," Quatre continued, trying to lighten the mood. The future would arrive at its own pace and in its own shape; that was one thing he'd learned.

"What?" Trowa asked, not very interestedly. He was shifting on the floor, an unconscious attempt to get more comfortable. Neither of them suggested moving to the bed close by, though. There was an unspoken reluctance to lose the contact between their two bodies.

"It registered a fault when it completely missed its predictions of the future where we are concerned."

"Uh?"

"It screwed up when it predicted our break-up and that pisses it off," Quatre translated.

Trowa frowned. "But you said it hit a limitation."

"Yes. I'm sure that if this thing came with a manufacturer's warranty, it would say: Warning, contact with illogical emotions such as love and faith can cause errors in analyses. Bloody Jishin... "

"So why is it working on this?"

"Zero is a self-evolving program. When it's confronted with a factor it doesn't know, it elaborates a research plan to address this. Like it did with the Immortal question, observing Fen to understand-"

Trowa covered his eyes with a groan. "No. Don't tell me."

"Yes. I'm afraid that a tiny part of Zero has created a new parameter called Love which it is now researching, by dutifully observing, recording and analyzing everything that we've been-"

"I asked you not to tell me... "

"You want to know something even better?"

" ...Not really... "

"We have a couple of other eavesdroppers."

Trowa lifted his hand from his face to peek at Quatre questioningly.

"Svale and Duo hooked into the sanctuary lines over an hour ago, to see if we were having a fight- oh, funny that, they just left right this moment," Quatre added sardonically.

Trowa sighed, then he bundled Quatre more comfortably into his arms. "That's okay. Them we can kill later. Not much we can do about Zero... "

"No," Quatre whispered.

" ...I wish I could help. Without being condescending and over-protective, of course," the shaman added with a ghost of his old smile.

"Well... you can make sure to give me a human perspective to weigh against this bloody weapon in my head," Quatre muttered.

"With pleasure." Trowa brushed aside a blond curl that was trying to work its way into Quatre's eye. "I just wish I could do more. I wish I could help you carry this burden."

"I know," Quatre answered softly. "But you can't."

"I know."

The acceptance coloring Trowa's aura was tainted with helplessness and regret, it was fragile and pained. But Quatre trusted Trowa's strength. Trowa would overcome this, he would accept this. He would be by Quatre's side, wherever their lines carried them.

"So... now what do we do?" Trowa asked quietly.

"Well, we could move to the bed-"

Trowa rolled his eyes. "I meant, when-"

"-and I can show you a few more tricks with patterns I bet you never even thought of."

Trowa paused, and looked at Quatre's predatory leer with a mixture of interest and some trepidation. " ...I think I should mention that I just enjoyed a very satisfying orgasm. I don't know what you have in mind, but it might have to wait for a shower and a short rest first-"

"Lover, the human body has resources you never even dreamed of," Quatre murmured, his fingers playing not-so-innocently over Trowa's belt.

The shaman appeared to consider this for a moment. Then in an explosion of movement, Quatre found himself hoisted away from the flagstones bruising his hipbone, and into a pair of strong arms.

"Really? Show me."

\---

 

Next Chapter: Catalyst

Heero tries to get Duo and Wufei to work together. This goes just about as well as you’d expect.


	40. Catalyst

Chemistry was easy. Heero had no problems with chemistry. You added two elements and they reacted. Sometimes a catalyst was needed. But other than that, the reaction was always the same, always controlled, always predictable.

Link up a few atoms of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen together into chains of ribonucleic acids, and suddenly things were infinitely more complicated than they needed to be.

In Heero's opinion, that was where the universe of matter had started to go wrong. This new chemical reaction called Life had a will of its own; it played poker with the laws of physics and probability, and always tried to cheat.

And humans were the worst of the lot.

Take this one, for instance...

The fist thudded against Heero's armored forearm, and he retaliated instinctively. Wufei's eyes widened - he jerked his head sideways and Heero's riposte whistled past his right ear. Heero's moment of satisfaction was brief. Wufei's knee had already impacted into his thigh. Heero staggered, which placed him within striking range. He wrenched himself out of the way and fell back a step.

Though the two warriors were made from the same chemical components, Heero's design was forty-seven percent more efficient, giving him added strength and agility. They both wore Dragon armor, but Wing was superior to Shenlong. And Wufei had flaws in his concentration. Heero was possessed of a concentration that could chew rocks.

Yet Wufei was surprisingly close to Heero's level.

The man seemed driven by the need for revenge. Heero didn't understand revenge. Killing someone who had harmed you so that they wouldn't do it again was as logical as two oxygen molecules hooking up. But Wufei wanted to avenge people who were already dead. Juusan could no longer harm them. So Heero really didn't see the point. But this exercise in futility seemed to be what was giving Wufei the burning energy to keep up with Heero.

Normally Heero didn't care about concepts that did not affect the Mission. But in this instance, and very annoyingly, this was in fact part of the Mission. Heero's Guide had shown him that using a Friend could boost his own strength immensely; a form of weapon. It made sense - until you actually had to work with the bundles of temper and contradictions.

"You look hot, Wu."

Wufei froze, his fist raised, his eyes going wide.

Heero frowned at the interruption. Yes, the day was warm. The fact didn't deserve a comment. Neither did it deserve Wufei's sudden distraction.

What was strange was that Duo himself suddenly looked flustered. He scrunched down a bit on the rock he’d hopped up on.

"I meant, it's sunny," he muttered after clearing his throat abruptly. "And you guys have been at it for an hour. Don't get heat-stroke."

It hadn't deserved one comment. Heero couldn't imagine how even Duo could believe it deserved two. The Jishin wasn't meeting their gaze. He was examining one of the rocks that had strayed from the sanctuary with something like hostile intent (as far as Heero could see; when it came to understanding human emotions, he only had a set of very rudimentary concepts to work with).

Wufei's glare was downright poisonous. He did look a bit hot, now; his face was flushed. And he'd forgotten he was in the middle of a fight with Heero.

"I told you to keep your comments to yourself, Maxwell. Go away and play with that disrespectful stone creature that's always hanging around you," Wufei sneered, glaring pointedly at the pocket where the small golem usually resided.

"Can't," Duo drawled, his eyes dangerous. "It's taking a nap. It gets downright grouchy when it can't get its fifteen hours of sleep a day. Almost as cranky as you can be."

"Max-"

"Come on, Wufei. You've had your fun. Why don't you go have a drink, stick your head in a bucket of cold water or something, and let me have a go with Deadly over there. I need to practice too."

Heero started to look around for something 'deadly'. An annoyed glance in his direction from Wufei's hot, black eyes told him who Duo had meant.

Duo was even harder to understand than Wufei, and not only because few of his words actually made sense. The magic-user was a knot of screaming contradictions in Heero's view of the universe. Duo was also fueled by this 'revenge', even more than Wufei. His aura was a maelstrom. But the actions that resulted from this chaos were coldly calculated and finely manipulative. That was like turning lead into gold, as far as Heero was concerned. 

This Friend of his was distracting. Working with him was difficult; it demanded a mental agility Heero didn't have or particularly want to gain. However the Friend was now a necessary adjunct to the first part of the Mission. A weapon. Heero needed to use him - but not rely on him entirely. By necessity, he would be finishing the Mission alone after all.

But there were issues getting this weapon to work properly. Taken singly, these two humans were powerful fighters. But putting them together didn’t double their strength, as one would expect. Quite the contrary. Wufei's finely honed obsession seemed to dissipate into meaningless flares of annoyance. And Duo's cold focus wavered, leaving him unreliable and prone to wild changes in behavior.

If either of them had had that effect on Heero, he would have killed them, or gone away. That was the logical course of action. Well, not only did these annoying heaps of protein and water ignore the logical, they seemed perversely drawn into proximity, aggravating the effect (and each other). Duo would reliably show up to watch Heero and Wufei practice. Wufei would frequently go and check the Jishin's progress when the latter was working on the sanctuary's defenses in preparation for Juusan's arrival. Sooner or later, one or the other would let loose a verbal barb, as if deliberately trying to attract the other's hostile attentions, and suddenly they were glaring at each other, words drawn like daggers, locked in an argument full of sarcasm and half-worded insults directed at each other's ancestors. 

What was stranger was that despite repeated clashes, they never killed each other. And the next day, they'd be at it again.

Heero had heard Svale talk to Trowa the other day. She'd described them as 'two cats in a bag'. That was the first time in his short life that Heero had actually understood a metaphor (he'd been both somewhat proud and a bit disturbed at the fact).

Maybe it was like oxygen and hydrogen. Maybe they just needed a spark, an explosion, and then things would stabilize.

 

\--- 

Wufei glared at the annoying Jishin specimen that was trying to interrupt his practice. Fighting with Heero was exhilarating; the man was a machine. Physically he had no flaws. And mentally, he was learning how to use Wing's defenses in leaps and bounds, as if he'd been waiting for this kind of tool all his life.

The Dragons admired strength, and respected it more than the ties of race and country. It helped to ease the pain of seeing one of his race's armor on someone else's back. Wufei could think of few, even in the ranks of the Dragons, more worthy of wearing Wing. It was an honor and a privilege to hone this warrior into an even greater weapon. He didn't want any interruptions. Particularly this one!

"Heero and I are busy preparing for Juusan's arrival, Jishin. Do not interrupt."

Duo's eyes narrowed. "Chill, Dragon. I haven't forgotten about the Scourge, trust me. But I'll be fighting him too. Or had you forgotten that."

"You'll be on the sidelines, blocking his magic while Heero and I do the fighting," Wufei corrected him coolly.

"Since I don't think you two will do more than slow him down, I better practice my fighting as much as I can," Duo retorted in a biting tone.

"We'll slow him down," Wufei shot back menacingly. "We'll slow him down dead. Have no fear of that."

He glanced automatically at Heero, to include him in that statement, and realized that his erstwhile opponent had turned away and was heading towards the edge of the bowl-like depression where they trained.

"Heero?"

"Fix this."

Wufei and Duo both stared at the retreating back. Heero barely paused at the lip of the depression.

"You are wasting time and energy. I need you focused. Do whatever it takes to disperse this tension before I return, then we will continue training."

An interesting little silence lingered in the training ground after the stomp of Heero's boots had faded.

"... Did Heero just tell us to sort our shit out by having a match?" Duo finally asked, his voice strangely cautious.

Wufei nodded shortly. The gesture probably looked a great deal more certain than he felt.

"At least, I hope that's what he meant," Duo muttered, voicing Wufei's own slight apprehension.

Heero might have had a point about staying focused, but he'd made them both sound equally guilty, Wufei thought, bristling. Wufei wasn't the one who started the arguments. He'd been making efforts with the Jishin. Despite repeated provocation, Wufei had kept to their unspoken agreement to not escalate any baiting into a full-blown fight, or even a shouting match. Wufei tried to ignore the bastard's innuendos and implied insults. Of course, Wufei's own behavior was irreproachable. The stupid Jishin just couldn't seem to handle criticism, or even constructive advice, which was just one more moral failing of his in Wufei's eyes. Duo Maxwell was a planet-sized irritation, but-...

But?

Wufei shook himself abruptly.

Heero might have been abrupt, but that was his way. Who cared anyway? What Heero had actually done was hand Wufei the perfect excuse to take this bloody Jishin down a peg or two under the pretext of a training bout. Was there even the slightest downside to this?

A glance at the Jishin showed his thoughts reflected in the suddenly cruel smile. The disguise of worn leather rippled and slithered into a new configuration; the mage's battle-suit, sleek and black, buckled tight with no loose cloth to grab, the long gloves open at the palms to not hamper the lethal bursts of energy. The material over Duo's weak points solidified further, hardening like chitin over his crotch, abdomen, upper torso and forearms.

Wufei met and matched the darkness in those blue eyes and fell into a defensive stance.

The breath of uncertainty that Heero's words had first caused disappeared in a flare of fighting spirit, anticipation and adrenaline.

Duo held himself loosely. He looked relaxed, but Wufei spotted a familiar flicker at the Jishin's back; the end of the braid, now roped in dark leather, was dancing back and forth, alive with excitement.

"We haven't done this in awhile," Duo murmured. "You don't mind, now, do you, Dragon?"

"No," Wufei answered, keeping Duo in his sight as his opponent slowly started to circle him. "It will be good practice. Juusan will also use magic and sly tricks. I might as well get used to it with you, first." It was a wonder he'd never thought of this before.

"I can't say it will do me much good, since you're nowhere near the Scourge's level of power," Duo said archly. "But hell, it'll be fun. Let's dance."

That was the only warning Wufei got, not that he needed any. He dodged under the first hurled energy bolt and sent a surge of power to Shenlong's energy field to counter another. The bolt fizzled in a burst of light. Wufei darted forward instantly, hoping to catch the Trickster momentarily blinded and off his guard.

Duo danced backwards. Distance was to the magic-user's advantage. Wufei pressed him, not letting him get away. A swipe of energy from Shenlong's fang sent Duo dodging off to one side. Wufei hadn't been trying to hit him, merely corner him. He sent a surge of power into the rear plate of his armor, propelling him towards Duo.

The slim, black shape twisted and leaped backwards, somersaulting gracefully out of reach.

Fast and slippery as a snake, Wufei growled internally, whipping around and sending another beam of power flaring out. He had the gratification of seeing Duo's eyes widen. The Jishin's dodge was clumsy - Duo stumbled-

The black-gloved hand smacked into the ground, in a move that looked too ungainly to be anything other than - a bluff!

Wufei cursed and leaped aside, but too late; the rock and soil beneath his feet had twisted and turned to some sticky quicksand, sucking at his boots. He staggered- the sand turned to concrete in an instant.

"You don't mind if I use a bit more magic than the last time we tangoed, right?" Duo drawled, "I was only using a fraction of my power back then, to stay off of Juusan's radar. Oh, did I forget to mention that?" He stood up and brushed off his hands, not even bothering to press home an attack against the pinned Dragon.

"I don't mind, Jishin," Wufei growled. "In fact I insist you use your magic. Go ahead and do your worst. You can teleport, too. No need to jump all over the place like a flea."

"I decided not to. I want to give you some sort of advantage," Duo murmured, lazily examining the tips of his glove for remaining dirt. "Won't be any fun for me otherwise."

Wufei would have cheerfully murdered him at that point.

He focused the anger. It cut him, it burned; it turned into a weapon. Shenlong hissed and powered up. The thrum of energy that rippled through Wufei loosened the rock holding him. He ripped away from the trap and hurled himself at his enemy.

Duo twisted away from the grab- and then fell back under a flurry of blows.

Strike- parry- blow- dodge- The rhythm of the fight was a riotous heartbeat.

Magic clashed against energy field. Fists smashed against black armor like glass.

Wufei felt whole. He was one intent. Duo filled his world, became the goal. No longer an annoyance Wufei had to force himself to ignore; no longer an irritation - always there, always dragging his attention to blue eyes dark soul mocking grin- always always- always challenging, always demanding- always always-

Duo's fist - glass and razorblades - brushed his cheek, a savage punch that did not fully connect.

Wufei twisted and kneed- Duo grunted and fell back.

A trickle of blood caressed Wufei's cheek, curved around his jaw like the touch of a warm finger- ignore it. They hadn't set the parameters of the match, but it went without saying that it wouldn't stop at first blood.

Wufei grabbed his opponent- pinned one shoulder, missed the arm. Duo's harsh breathing rang in his ear. The cruel, delighted smile hadn't wavered. Wufei twisted the shoulder. Bring him to his knees! Duo seemed to melt, to bend and twist and - Wufei had to let go to block a vicious short stab at his gut.

He caught the wrist- but Duo kicked, managed to loosen his arm and struggle backwards. The black figure darted away, one hand rubbing distractedly at the spot where Wufei had held him. Wufei tore his eyes away from the long fingers curled around the black-clad wrist, and wondered why he hadn't pressed forward and taken a decisive advantage.

A flash of anger banished the momentary distraction.

"Stop playing around, Maxwell!"

Duo had retreated to a prudent distance. He straightened and turned, relaxed and ready for another round. "What do you mean, Chang?"

"Come at me like you mean it," Wufei ordered harshly. "You have the magic of your entire race at your disposal. Why are you leaping about like a bug?!"

Duo's eyes narrowed, gun-metal blue. "You want me, Dragon? One hundred percent?"

"Definitely," Wufei hissed, ignoring the possible innuendo; that dangerous light in the Jishin's eyes hinted that for once, the words could be taken entirely at face value.

The answering smile was as bright and sharp as the beloved sword Wufei had lost over a year ago.

Duo dropped, lithe, cat-like, into an attack position, energy swirling in his palm-

\- and vanished.

Wufei's mind triggered Shenlong's sensors. A green-blue lattice covered the world in Wufei's vision-

\- and a red ripple in the air appeared over his right shoulder.

Wufei spun and struck. His fist met a warm, pliant body.

Arms that had been reaching out to him scrabbled against Shenlong in shock. Duo managed to twist and ‘blink' away, reappearing ten feet away gasping and rubbing his abdomen.

Wufei stayed where he was. He crossed his arms over his chest and smiled slightly; maybe it was just a bit of a smirk.

"My race developed a very sensitive radar that can track disturbances in the ether, from a ship ripping out into normal space, down to the ripple of someone teleporting. Oh, did I forget to mention that?"

Duo gave him a venomous glare and an amused smile, as if those two things went together perfectly, as if the man's entire being wasn't one single aggrieving, annoying contradiction.

"Nice. Very nice." Duo chuckled. The praise sounded perfectly honest. Wufei felt hot and irritated for no reason he could discern, and decided that the praise of a twisted Jishin was probably worse than an insult.

"Is this the best you can do, Trickster? Is your race that decadent and feeble?" he snarled.

Duo's eyes narrowed as his smile broadened. Maddening creature. "No. If I wanted to, I could blow a hole in this planet the size of your ego. Or the size of the moon. Whichever's biggest."

Wufei sniffed, though indeed he believed every word. Well, not the bit about his ego, of course, but-

"I'm restraining myself to the amount of power I think I'll have when I'll be busy spending most of it blocking the Scourge," Duo informed him. “It's important that I learn how to pace myself with the little left. And you know what, Dragon?"

Duo shrugged, a gesture that rippled across his body, like a black cat stretching lazily as it watched the mouse, sensuous and-

"You know what? It's still enough to kick your ass."

Wufei blinked at the empty space. His moment of distraction almost cost him the fight. It wasn't Shenlong's sensor that told him to duck, it was pure instinct.

He fell straight to the ground. Duo's blast - point blank right behind Wufei - glanced off his shoulder armor. Wufei used the momentum to roll away from the kick he knew was coming; knew it because that's what Wufei would have done, a warrior's reflex to press the advantage. Shenlong's damage indicator had flickered to orange. Minor cracks in the shoulder piece. The Gundanium was reenergising and repairing itself, the bolt hadn't been powerful enough to kill, but it would have knocked him down, and maybe out.

Wufei staggered to his feet, dodged left to avoid a punch, and then used his Dragon Scale's boosters to lift him straight up and vault over his attacker, giving him room to maneuver.

Duo was faster than a falling shadow. Wufei was defending himself before his feet touched ground.

Blow. Counter-blow. Wufei's boots might have hit stone; he couldn't tell. His body was a thing of energy and instinct, orbiting the crashing fury of his heartbeat. The flurry of attacks was faster than thought. He stopped thinking and let the dance take over.

Duo managed to pin him against a rock. The spirit armor was cool to Wufei's heated touch. He could feel it through layers of cloth where the Scale’s metal didn't protect him. Duo was breathing heavily. A faint smell, sun on warm rocks, tickled Wufei's nose. The Jishin was barely sweating, though.

Bastard's strong...

In the heat of battle, the faint admiration slipped through the net of Wufei's strict and disciplined mind.

Time to show him what I'm capable of. He can't dismiss me.

"What's the matter, Dragon?" Soft tickle of air against Wufei's ear; a breathless chuckle. "Is this the tough mechanists who were so sure they could kick our asses back during the Twilight?"

Keep laughing, Duo... keep laughing...

Wufei's mind, body and chi melded together with Shenlong. One harmony, one intent.

Duo yelped as he was tossed aside by the blast. Wufei was already on him.

Won't _let_ you dismiss me...

A punch got through Duo's defenses. He folded over, and Wufei grabbed the front of the sleek black cloth near the neck, twisting the tight material to get a grip with both hands. The Dragon felt almost light-headed from the burst. His body thrummed and purred, still wanting battle.

"What's the matter, bone-eater?" he parodied. "Is this the arrogant Tricksters who claim to be the oldest and strongest race?"

Duo's eyes twinkled despite the near-stranglehold on his collar. "Bone-eater? Are you mechanical apes still calling us those fairytale names? Do Dragon children hide under their quilts and fear us like the boogieman?"

"No, and I don't fear you, either," Wufei growled, twisting. Duo was off-balance, and Wufei's hold kept him that way.

"Maybe that's through lack of knowledge, my pretty Dragon... "

Suddenly the cloth Wufei clasped twisted under his hands, slithering free. And his wrists were gripped in a vice stronger than stone, lifting him away with deliberate ease and slowness. It interrupted the considerable rant Wufei had been about to launch into, regarding Duo's last words.

"Maybe you should learn what the word Jishin actually means."

"Don't know, don't care, don't intend to learn," Wufei growled as he tried to rip his hands free, but it was like trying to move a mountain. He kicked - only to find his arms wrenched straight out, his body yanked forward by the wrists so that it slammed into Duo's, restraining his range of movements. His hands were held away from his body by a grip like the rock of ages, pressing the two opponents chest to chest. Wufei snarled and tried to step back, to regain his balance, but he was quite caught.

"In the Old Tongue, which was old long before your ancestors heard tales about changelings and Tricksters eating the bones of children -"

Energy started pounding around him in a tight circle. Wufei's warrior instincts mobilized, working on breaking the deadlock-

He could feel Duo's breath against his cheek, even through the growing tumult around them. It caressed his skin. The spirit armor was cool. Duo's lips radiated heat as he spoke, his breathing quickened by exertion.

\- maybe a head-butt right into that arrogant face- give Wufei the opportunity to rip his hand away and-

The grip around his wrists felt unbreakable, but not bruising, holding him securely.

"In the Old Tongue," Duo whispered, tilting his head slowly, "Jishin means earthquake."

The ground screamed and cracked; a fissure twisted itself in the stone beneath Wufei's feet. The earth's growl rang in his bones, wild and dangerous and as exhilarating as fighting a sleek, black shape like a shadow.

Shenlong hummed, a deep, steady counterpoint to the chaotic rumble. Wufei was gathering up every ounce of power, every molecule of his energy- no choice, no question, no doubt. The forces around him ripped the ground, cracked a stone ten feet away, but he was not afraid. The build-up was phenomenal, rising up swiftly between them, in the air where only mingled breaths seemed to dwell-

\- Duo's grip had loosened, they were grasping each other's hand like wrestlers. The unleashed energy tried to rip them apart but neither of them gave ground.

Until someone grabbed Wufei by the shoulder, and threw him several feet away.

He grunted as he landed hard. He growled, and then froze as Shenlong's warnings suddenly registered. He desperately tried to stabilize and disperse the massive amount of power running through the Gundanium structure. His processor was flashing a few numbers in his eye - actually, it had been printing out alarming figures for awhile now, blithely ignored. Wufei managed not to go critical, and stared at the gage slowly creeping down again. He was dazedly impressed. He'd never realized he could get that much energy out of his armor.

Blinking through the red haze of the warning screen, he realized that Duo had also been tossed aside. The Jishin was on his knees, about ten feet away. He looked as bemused as Wufei. The tremors had subsided. Duo shook his head, blinking. The braid fell over his shoulder to thump into the rock with a noise that sounded loud in the crystallized silence.

The whole area was covered in a film of dust, shaken up from the ground. Heero rose out of the smoke like an angry god.

Like a bewildered and angry god, Wufei corrected himself, still a bit stunned.

"You... "

Heero clenched his teeth as if he wanted to bite the words to pieces.

"That was not what was supposed to happen," he finally growled. "You are not to injure yourselves."

Injure... ? Wufei staggered to his feet. His reasonable side - which had apparently been taking a coffee break during the fight - informed him that the amount of power he'd gathered could have blown him and Duo to Hell.

The fact sat there in his mind, but meant nothing to him. He hadn't been about to release that energy. He... hadn't the foggiest idea what he'd been doing, really. He wasn't stupid enough to let his grievance with Maxwell compromise his sacred duty of revenge. What...

What exactly had been happening here?

That was obviously what Heero was wondering. Or rather, not wondering, in that odd, blind way of his. He looked cross, but there were no questions, no attempts to understand, to mediate. Wufei was beginning to know Heero's fighting style well, but the man's thought processes were still a mystery to him.

"You will not do that again," Heero growled. "It is stupid not to focus on the mission. You will stop getting distracted."

Wufei wondered if he was imagining the note of befuddled exasperation in Heero's voice. Apparently, the strange young man had learned there were limits to his powers. This was something even the mighty warrior couldn't fight, beat or control.

Wufei was damned if he knew what 'it' was. Still dazed and throbbing with exhaustion, adrenaline and excitement, Wufei discarded the question. This... This hadn't happened.

In a move that was almost embarrassing it was so synchronous, he and Duo turned away at the same time and headed out of the bowl in opposite directions. Wufei felt, in a distant way, that he would spend all night glaring at the ceiling, reinventing that strange moment until it made sense, and worrying about what Duo- Maxwell would think- it was easier not to dwell on it at all.

There was an irritated growl behind him; Heero had probably just realized he'd lost both his sparring partners.

\--- 

 

The attempt to create stability had failed. Fortunately, Heero had shown up in time to stop his Friend from getting killed and thus reducing Heero's overall fighting force.

Matters had returned to a simmering status quo. Wufei and Duo had been assiduously avoiding each other. The Sanctuary had been remarkably calm and free of angry debates. But past experience indicated this state of affairs would not last. 

The Jishin was lounging in a chair near the dinner table, staring up at the ceiling. The little stone golem was blinking sleepily on his shoulder, and giving its master the occasional puzzled glance.

Wufei was leaning stiffly near the door, as far as he could get from Duo and still be in the same room. His arms were crossed over his chest, and he was glowering at nothing.

Heero realized he wasn't the only one scrutinizing the pair. Quatre was also looking from one to the other, with that deep, remote light in his eyes, a stare that seemed to see right through solid matter and into the Forbidden. Heero was expecting some dire prediction of the future; instead, Quatre just smiled. The healer leaned towards Trowa and whispered something in his ear. Trowa was leaning back against the wall, long legs sprawled out before him on the bench they shared. He looked asleep, but he still snorted softly and muttered: "You didn't need Zero for that.”

Heero eyed the distance between Trowa and Quatre, measuring it down to the millimeter. For awhile, Heero had been honestly worried that his Guide was breaking apart; that the two units that composed it, Trowa and Quatre, would become unstable too. The idea had chilled him. His Mission was hard enough as it was. He had no idea if he was ready to meet the Thirteenth Aspect, but the confrontation was now inevitable, and he'd have to do his level best to defeat Him and then fulfill the Mission.

But according to Heero's observations in the past few days, the problem seemed to have resolved itself. The pair had spent a day and a night locked away, apparently in an effort to regain the balance in their relationship. Heero, armed with only rudimentary understanding on humans and their bonding, judged that they had not been entirely successful. Quatre still liked to wander off on his own sometimes, looking preoccupied; he'd give anybody who approached a long, blank stare until they left, even Trowa. And Heero caught Trowa watching the healer on occasion, as if he were cautiously circling something both essential to him, yet dangerous.

Hopefully they wouldn't drift apart- Heero caught himself. 'Hope' was not a word he used. Until recently, it wasn't a word he even understood. He considered it a weakness. Things either were, or were not. The future arrived at its own pace, and you could only influence it from the present by your actions, not by wishful thinking.

And ultimately, there was no hope in the future. Heero knew it. There was nothing but extinction.

"Ah, I think I hear him!" Svale chirped, thumping her mug down on the table and nearly squashing imp, who'd wandered over to sample the cheese and biscuits the crone had laid out.

The windows rattled faintly, then the hum of Howard's spaceship became audible.

"Good," muttered G, who'd been observing imp with fascination since the little thing had poked its head out of Duo's pocket. "I hope he's got something for us."

The Wardens had been working together assiduously these past few days, trying to track down the last Hearth Stone the sanctuary spell required. G had rounded them up that morning, telling them that Howard had come across a clue, and was flying in to discuss it with them.

When Howard appeared, he was wearing a tight mauve space suit with big yellow and pink fish painted on it. Heero had no sense of aesthetics to speak of - he was barely aware of the lack - but something still made him frown as his eyes caught on that.

"Hi guys! How you doing, kid?"

"Fine," Duo answered. His voice was around five decibel lower than usual, Heero noted. In his corner Wufei scowled, as if Duo's single word was a provocation, yet he'd tensed and hunched his shoulders almost defensively. Quatre snickered quietly, covering it with a cough. Svale chortled for no reason, and Trowa sighed. Heero decided they were all unreliable heaps of irritating carbon and wished, not for the first time, that his Mission didn't involve these distractions.

"Good, good." The man in the loud, ugly suit hopped over to the table and grabbed an ale. "I see you were ready for me."

"Tell us the news first, you drunkard, or you won't get a drop!" Svale screeched.

"Drunkard? Coming from you, crone, that's more irony than I can handle sober," Howard growled, before taking a long pull at the liquid of fermented hops and barley, the attraction of which Heero couldn't begin to understand. He'd tried it once and found it bitter and nutritionally inadequate.

"What did you find?" Trowa asked before Svale could attack Howard with her staff.  
"Plenty. We have a trace on the power source we need. It fits all your specifications, G. The problem is finding it."

"What do you mean?" G asked, eyes narrowing. "If it's magical, H can divine it's location through a link with Gaia-"

"It ain't magical, that's why you guys couldn't find it in the first place."

"A techno item?" Svale spat. "What good is that? We need magic, not nuclear fusion!"

"It's not that kind of item. It's an Ether-based capacitor. It stores power and can form a resonance circuit - similar to your magic rocks. I got in touch with J before coming here; he says it should work the same."

"You said you needed to find it?" Quatre asked.

"Yes," Howard sighed. "The capacitor was invented by this group of techno-holies; extreme religious Cabalists. Their community suffered some kind of disaster a while back. They're scattered around, and we're trying to find them, or preferably their invention."

"They don't sound like they'd give up their gizmo willingly," Svale muttered.

"Hell no. These guys are nutters, and I'm speaking as a Cabalist myself. They invented this thing, and now they virtually worship it. Even though it's useless if you don't feed it ether-carried power. They don't even call it a capacitor. They call it the Orb of Ophed, or something similarly lyrical-"

"The Orb of Ophed?" Quatre interrupted sharply.

"Yes. It's not big, and it's round, so I'll give them points on geometrical exactitude at least, but you should give things their proper scientific name, you know.”

"But... the Orb of Ophed... " Quatre's eyes widened. "Wasn't that that thing those men who attacked us months ago were looking for? The thing-"

" **Fool!** "

"The thing Duo said he'd stolen from them and pawned off for the price of a bad beer?" Quatre finished a bit weakly, with a glance at Duo who slammed both fists into his head and was now scowling at the table.

Humans, Heero thought with an internal sigh. They could make just about anything more complicated than it needed to be.

 

\---

 

Next Chapter: In a mirror darkly

Dragons are honorable fighters who respect their enemies. But there is a caveat for annoying Jishin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What’s this?? The end of the previous SoaT chapter posted... and a new chapter incoming?! Indeed, from here on out, there be Dragons (and Jishin and Scourges and other things). However, since some of the further chapters still need work, I’ll be falling back to a every-other-week posting schedule. Assuming real life doesn’t get me in a choke hold, and slow me down further for a few months (for those who missed it, I'm possibly looking down the barrel of an international move of major proportions, so yeah, busy busy.) But fear not, I will finish this thing if it’s the bloody last thing I do.


	41. In a Mirror Darkly

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter partly finished and polished some ten thousand kilometres away from my comfy computer (thank you Google Docs) on the other side of the planet and on Way Too Little Sleep, please feel free to play 'spot the typos'.

“Have I mentioned that I _hate_ outer space? What a fucking stupid way to travel,” Duo groused.

“Because disintegrating yourself and hurling your atoms through the arcane sphere is so much more reasonable,” Wufei countered (despite having repeatedly resolved to just ignore the pest.)

He kicked off from the spaceship’s outer hull with the smallest of pushes, aiming for a block that housed the aft antenna array if he was any judge. The utter silence of outer space cradled him, with only the creaks of his scale adjusting to his slight movements and the hum of his life support unit. And a whole lot of whining over the intercom.

“Hey, at least teleportation’s fully under my control- bones and stones, Dragon! Stop- stop jumping around! Don’t you know what could happen if you don’t stick your landing?!”

“I would drift off into the vast emptiness of space until I asphyxiate or die of cold, depending on which, of my air or my energy reserves, depletes first,” said Wufei in a somber voice as he floated along.

There was an awesome little sound over the ‘com, best described as a nervous mewl.

Wufei’s feet touched ever so lightly against the metal and adhered via the magnetic field he turned on with a thought. He turned to look back at the Jishin. Wufei’s new foothold was now at an angle to what Maxwell would currently consider his ‘down’, which was bound to distress a landlubber even further.

“That’s what would happen if I was a ridiculous Trickster mage. Since I am a Dragon, however, that wouldn’t be the case. Shenlong’s energy field can be manipulated to jet me around, and I’ve been space walking since before I took my first step on real land.” He’d been born in space, two years out from Jiachan on a long-haul where his mother and his grandmother had been fullfling a mercenary contract.

Duo Maxwell was stuck to the spaceship’s hull as if this might increase his chances of not floating off into the void (rather than giving him less control over possible nervous movements that could propel him away). The glass armor was covering him entirely, coming over the head in a shiny oblong into which he conjured air, pressure and heat through some means Wufei couldn’t be bothered to investigate. The effect and the way he clung made him look like a human cockroach. Apt.

“Come on, Jishin. The airlock is just up ahead. If you dally too long, they’ll realize what we’re doing and be waiting for us.”

Duo pulled himself forward carefully, about one whole inch in total. “Think I’m scared of a bunch of techno-nutters, forewarned or not?” he muttered.

“If they are forewarned, they could jettison the airlock block as we’re trying to access it and send us spiraling off into space,” said Wufei, more for the effect than for the likelihood the Cabal actually had such a preventative measure against boarders.

This got them into the airlock in less than a minute and with no more than a thin thread of swearing interspersed with pants over the intercom.

“Hm.” Wufei glanced over the access hatch, then jerked the handle to open it and reveal the release mechanism. “Let’s see... An analog board? No required psychic interfacing? Was this ship built before the Cull or something?”

“Shhhh.” Duo was clinging to the airlock’s entrance - though a thin sticky tendril of something black ran from his suit and hooked onto a projection further back. Presumably a preventative measure in case the airlock was jettisoned. Shenlong’s energy field had tinted to protect him from UV rays, so nobody could see Wufei’s small wicked smile. “Not so loud, Chang. They could be right behind this door.”

“I am not touching any metal part of-“

“Shh!”

“... You don’t even know how vacuum works?”

“I know it kills you,” Duo ground out.

“Yes, it can.” Wufei’s wrist unit unfurled an interface spike which he plunged into the uncovered panel’s wiring. “Know what else can kill you?”

“More than you can possibly-“

“An airlock’s hatch closing on you.” Wufei stretched out his free arm, nabbed the planet-baby and hauled him out of the way of the uncaring door mechanism sliding shut instantaneously.

Time was a factor here, all joking aside, but he should have thought it through a bit more. It would have only taken ten seconds to tell Duo to get out of the way of the closing door and why. Now he was going to waste at least twenty seconds disentangling himself from a filthy Jishin who’d grabbed him with both arms and legs like a koala grabbing the trunk of a tree he’d fallen out of.

The inner airlock cracked. A puff of mist and noise returning to his universe meant air and atmosphere was pressurizing in the airlock.

Shenlong pulsed. One tiny throb of power picked up the Jishin and thrust him back against the outer airlock. Wufei ripped the hand with the interface spike out of the access panel’s guts and hurled a wide-beam blast from his dragon fang into the room without even taking a second to see what was being revealed through the opening.

Several crashes echoed through the airlock space as objects in the room beyond were hurled towards the far wall by his blast. There was also solid thumps and at least one loud yell of pain. A welcoming committee.

Shenlong thrummed, power shaped and boosted him through the airlock’s door and into the far room at an angle to fetch up somewhere near what would be the ceiling, if the gravity field on the spaceship hadn’t been disrupted. His eyepiece laid a grid with two targets blinking red in the overlay coating the room. Wufei flipped as he neared the ceiling, his boots hit the hard metal and propulsed him towards the two men still flailing near the far wall, trying to get their hands back on the weapons they’d dropped when the wide beam energy burst had hit them.

His trajectory ended up shoving one further into the bulkhead. Wufei wedged a foot against a console and used the anchor it afforded him to punch both men into unconsciousness. Not fighters, just technologists, they didn’t know hand to hand in zero G.

At that point, the Jishin finally managed to claw his way out of the airlock and into the room.

“I can see why you insisted on coming with me to watch my back,” said Wufei sardonically.

Which was unfair, he immediately told himself (though damned if he was going to say it out loud for all that). He’d not tried to dissuade Duo from coming. He knew the Trickster wouldn’t be much help, but the Dragons were warriors and tacticians, and only a fool rushed into an enemy stronghold without even this pitiful help to watch his back. It had gone against the grain. And after minutes of trying to talk Heero into attempting a space walk, Duo had been the only volunteer. True, Trowa had also offered to help, but he’d never worn a spacesuit before, he’d have been just as useless as the Jishin. Probably more so since a crossbow’s mechanisms would not fare well in space.

“Do we know why Heero was so opposed to trying this?” Wufei wondered, half to himself as he broke the energy pack on the weapons the men had drawn, and then shoved both of the floating snoozers towards the far corner of the console room.

“He’s got a brain and no suicidal tendencies?” was the predictable and unhelpful response.

Heero had seemed so adamant. They knew so little about him, really... Wufei pondered as he hit the door release.

In the corridor outside, a large box of servo-motors - which would have been battened down properly on a Dragon ship - had crashed into a coffee vending machine. The fist-sized mechanisms hovered in mid-air while a myriad drops of liquid, possibly milk, floated like little stars in and around them. Wufei impelled himself around the mess, touching lightly against the ceiling, back down to the left wall and thus to the end of the hallway.

“Come on, Jishin.” He hadn’t needed to glance back or use the radar to know Duo was still in the first room, making his awkward and struggling way forward. “Just propel yourself section by section, and yelp if you see anybody point anything long and shiny at my back. Or throw yourself between us, if you prefer.”

“I wouldn’t even if I could, Dragon.”

“That’s what I thought.” The snipping was automatic.

Ah, a junction with a console. Wufei drifted over and plunged an interface spike into a handy port. Shenlong obligingly connected to the ship’s mainframe and unlocked a specific function.

“Take off your helmet, Jishin.”

“Huh? Why would I do that? This thing ain’t coming off until my feet feel mother earth beneath them again.”

“Suit yourself,” said Wufei with uncaring sadism (Dragons had a solid reputation for honor, not sweetness of nature).

Gravity switched on abruptly.

There was a holler, a thud, and then the sound of retching.

“Though I warn you, people can react badly to sudden changes in Gs when they’re not used to them.” His feet had touched deck with a solid clang, his whole body immediately poised to fight again. He’d set it at 3 Gs, easy enough for warriors of his caliber and Heero’s to fight in, and it should give them an edge against the opponents they might face if they were all techs like the two back there.

Wufei crossed to the opposite corridor, blueprints of the ship, hacked out from the mainframe, flashing in his left eye. “This way.”

Duo had thrown up, predictably, but since his armor’s headpiece had retracted at a thought, the sprawled Trickster wasn’t quite as noisome as he could have been.

“...One day... Chang... we’ll be in my domain-”

“Yes, yes, come on if you want to watch my back.”

\---

Three men were gathered around the junction 8A. One was hammering out orders on a keyboard and staring at the unresponsive system denying him access, a second one was praying out loud to the Great Machine as he plugged a laptop into the console, and a third one was banging on it. The one thing Howard had successfully done was hack the battleship's systems. Sweepers couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag, Wufei estimated, but they could code adequately.

The energy wave picked up the first man in line and hammered him into his two companions like a bowling ball in skittles.

Wufei shot after them and took the two still stirring out of action. Beneath his fist, a bone crunched. Then someone shouted off to his left. A small knot of uniformed goons, weapons coming out of holsters, and one of them lifted something like a bazooka in Wufei’s general direction.

A flicker of Shenlong’s energy field put him past their aiming zone. He absently shot the man spinning towards him, readying a greater blast from his left Fang to take out the other nine

A flash of weird light, a crackling noise and a woomph meant that the Jishin was finally back in the game. Good. The steady stream of muttered invectives in Old Tongue meant he was still pissed. Even better.

While the security detail spun around to face a cross Jishin, Wufei took out the remaining ones efficiently. The rest of the ship’s forces had been eliminated by the explosion in the missile bay earlier, and the two boarders had been picking off whatever teams had escaped at each junction while they were rushing ahead towards what they thought was the source of any invasion; a small ship wedged into one of the landing bays, partly buried in one wall.

Wufei stopped at a console that still looked functional and restored normal gravity, insuring another entertaining yelp from behind him. Then he walked up to the ship’s entrance hatch, bypassed Howard’s pitiful lock-out, and stomped on inside to the pilot’s station.

“And _that’s_ how you attack a heavily armed warship when you only have a spinnet,” he concluded.

Howard blinked at him from the control seat where Heero had been holding him all this time, as per instructions. Wufei would not normally commandeer a fellow technologist’s ship in that way... not unless the man was showing an abnormal level of cowardice. His spinnet didn’t have the kind of weapons that could dent a battleship armor, certainly, but it had good shielding and excellent maneuverability - the number of missiles Wufei had dodged coming in was certainly proof of that. And any ship with good shields and good maneuverability _was_ a weapon if you plowed it through the entrance bay’s forcefield and slammed it into a wall. Wufei had already ejected before then, leaving the ship behind as a tactical decoy as he spacewalked to another entrance to circle the attackers, uselessly surrounding what they thought was the vessel of an invading force.

Howard made a gargling sound. He should be grateful. His viral attack on the ship's system had stopped it from ripping Ether or sending out an immediate distress warning, but that would only have lasted for so long. A lot of the ship's systems had been analog or able to be bypassed, it would not have lain at their mercy for long. If they’d followed his suggestion and waited for his Sweeper troops to arrive in a few hours, the enemy could have regrouped with other vessels, and many on both sides would have died. And if he’d really wanted to avoid his ship getting used as a projectile, he shouldn’t have insisted on being ‘the designated driver’, they could have taken Wufei’s ship instead. The Anstra had proper armaments and missile countermeasures. Though the end result would have still been the same; the only way into a battleship was opposing it with equal force or penetrating it on the sly.

Heero let go of Howard’s shoulder and stalked out the door. Wufei looked at him with narrowed eyes. Granted, the most likely scenario was that Juusan would attack them on the ground, however if he knew one of the three bulwarks against him was afraid of a little space walk, the Scourge’s strategy would undeniably change. Wufei chalked up another thing to teach the strange warrior he was now allied with.

Trowa, Quatre and Svale tottered out of the ship, looking rather green in the face. Landlubbers, all of them.

Heero strode past Duo, who was leaning over, hands on his hips as he caught his breath. He was glaring, red in the face, sweaty, hair ruffled, armor smudged. Clearly not in his element. But _he_ had come with Wufei, a tiny part of the Dragon muttered in very grudging recognition.

“Keep an eye open. Shenlong reports no more signs of activity or moving com badges, but it’s piggybacking the ship’s sensors and the latter could be damaged.”

“Shoot anything that moves,” Duo ground out, hot eyes still on Wufei walking away. “Gotcha.”

“Leaving someone alive and conscious to tell us where to find the Orb might be considered helpful,” Quatre said tartly. He’d had plans to get them on board this technologist vessel. Wufei had not been interested. If he couldn’t take a single H-class man o’war inside a quiet solar system like Center’s, he did not deserve to wear his Scale.

The ship’s map flashed in his left eye. “There is a place called the Hall of Victory not too far from here,” Wufei informed them. “Sounds where they’d put this thing they’re so proud of. There’s also research labs aft. Quatre, Trowa, do you want to examine those? Have you seen this thing we’re looking for?”

“No, but I’ll know it when I see it,” said Quatre, heading down a corridor, Trowa walking quickly at his heels.

“That’s not aft, Winner.”

“I know.” He was talking in that flat voice again. Wufei hesitated. That voice suggested the man knew where to start looking.

“Fine, guess we start with the labs,” Wufei said. “One of them is marked as Weapons Research. Would this Orb qualify as a weapon-“

“Follow the leader,” said Duo, coming up beside him and watching Heero’s receding back. Wufei grumbled under his breath.

 

\---

 

The door hissed open onto an almighty mess. The lab wasn’t far from where Howard’s ship had crashed through the bay. The switches in gravity hadn’t helped.

“Looks trashed,” Duo muttered, eyes scouring empty lab benches, dented metal cabinets, smashed fume hoods and an almighty mess on the floor and up against one wall. “Swell. Okay, I told you what we’re looking for. Fortunately this Orb is pretty damn unbreakable. Practically Dragon-proof, and that’s saying something.”

Wufei could see several objects of about the right size. He kicked a whiteboard out of the way, toed what turned out to be a fossilized egg of some kind, then heaved up a knocked over spectrometer.

“They got pretty pissed at me when I broke into their mothership and stole one little bitty item without damaging anything significant,” Duo said, teeth showing in a humorless grin as he looked around. “When they come looking, I’m giving them your name, Dragon.”

“They already know it,” Wufei said coldly. ”I gave it to them when they refused to listen any further to Quatre and Howard’s negotiations. I told them who I was, what I wanted and what I intended to do if they didn’t hand it over. My race has not been gone so long that people could credibly believe I would make idle threats. They had their chance to resolve this peacefully.”

“Wasn’t arguing. Heero, bud, you find anything?”

Heero had been picking up pieces of this and that, looking at each intently, giving some of them a shake and then dropping them with a careless clang.

“Huh, some of this stuff is arcane.” Duo squatted and lifted without effort a large piece of lead shielding. “Busted, or drained for the most part. Odd, looks like they used them. Didn’t think they’d be interested in magic gizmos.”

“They could be studying these to know how to oppose them. We did.”

”...I’m surprised you guys didn’t get along better.

“You may see us all as technologists, but there is a massive difference,” Wufei said stiffly. “I will use technology to the fullest and respect my Scale, but I do not worship it. I knew they weren’t going to give us this thing as soon as they called it an Orb of Whatever rather than a proper technical term. That kind of messy thinking about technology is so ridiculous it almost loops back to being arcane, like some overbearing magic users giving everything portentous names.”

The unusual silence instead of a snip made him glance around. Duo was staring at something he’d picked up. Since it was a black stick the length of his forearm rather than an orb, Wufei didn’t think it was what they were looking for.

“Maxwell?"

“Hm? Oh, yeah, can’t see it here.” 

“Let’s check the next lab, that one has a Faraday cage and an ether dampener, it’d be the next best place to work on this thing."

“I think it’ll be in the Hall of Victory,” Duo said absently. “On their mothership I found it in the Hall of The Revered Machine last time I stole it. With a name like that, s’gotta be the same thing.”

“Sounds like a trophy room to me, but you could be right. Heero?” Wufei looked around. “Where did he go?”

“Tromped out of here two minutes ago.” Duo straightened up. Wufei noticed he slipped the baton into a bag he’d taken aboard with him.

“Damn. Follow him, make sure he doesn’t walk into the- do _you_ know what a reactor looks like?”

“Not a clue, but I’m good at reading Keep Out, Danger, Radiation and Scary Space Shit Ahead signs,” said Duo, heading out the door at a fast walk.

The next lab wasn’t so badly damaged, but it did not turn up anything relevant other than a few frightened lab techs who either did not know where the Orb was or refused to help an unbeliever. Wufei shoved them into the Faraday cage’s enclosure and stuck a metallic strut through the handle. Then he walked off to join his dubious allies.

The Hall of Victory was pretty messy as well. Objects had fallen off their pedestals or smashed through their glass display cases. Wufei swept a glance over it all, analytically. Banners, the emblem plates of defeated ships, some electronic gizmos, more arcane stuff taken from the corpses of fallen foes presumably. Heero was nowhere to be seen, Maxwell was at the far back of the room, looking at something. The lighting was bad; it’d been meant to dramatically highlight the now empty pedestals, and some of the bulbs had broken. Wufei kicked a few broken pieces out of the way, examined something that looked awfully like the Sarlo-Angat clan’s battle standard but turned out to be some picture or other instead, then stomped over to see what the Jishin was examining with such focus.

Duo was looking into a large full-length mirror that took up a good part of the far wall. He was standing hands on his hips, very still and stiff. Wufei caught a glimpse of the Jishin’s face in the mirror; the grin was as jagged as a bone-cutter’s hacksaw. Wufei did not have time to analyze the emotions behind that ugly smile. He was distracted by the image itself.

The mirror was dark, darker even than the mediocre lighting in the room could justify. It showed nothing of the pedestals and piled up junk behind them, Duo’s reflection hung against a backdrop of inky nothingness. Once gravity had come back, Duo’s armor had reverted to its usual appearance of ragged black leathers. But the Duo in the mirror was dressed in full armor, the black oil-slick of a mindjob that cut into his body as much as his enemies. The disconnect was shocking- and it was ten times worse when Wufei caught a glimpse of himself over Duo’s shoulder.

The mirror didn’t show him dressed in the mourning tunic and Shenlong, it showed him in the regalia he’d worn when he’d accepted the armor in the first place, the rich swirled gold and red silk, with the metal mountpieces into which Shenlong could be inserted for ceremonial functions, an imitation of the armors his ancestors had worn on their long-lost planet of re-birth. Regalia that had burned along with Jiachan over a year ago.

A... magic mirror? Oh, seriously, Wufei thought, rolling his eyes, a _magic_ mirror. Didn’t this part of the galaxy do anything sensible?

In the mirror, Duo finally tore his gaze away from his own reflection and caught sight of Wufei’s over the black-armored shoulder.

The Jishin’s face... crumpled.

Hurt? Sorrow? Gone so briefly and then it settled into downturned-mouth and a somber look.

“Fuck. Sorry, Wufei...” The tone was as completely out of left field as the look on his face.

“What?” Wufei took a few steps closer, scrutinizing the mirror suspiciously.

Duo was silent for a spell, still that look on his face. Then he sighed.

“Not sure I should tell you this... but I don’t think it’ll change your attitude. You’re as stubborn as a rock, and I’m a connoisseur. This... the fact that you can see your reflection in the Uulshanthis Mirror... it means you’re going to die soon.”

Wufei’s reflection lifted a quizzical and fairly unimpressed eyebrow. “Is that a fact?”

Duo rolled his eyes. “Yes, it’s a fact. This mirror is an artifact of my people, one of the ten great Masterpieces produced on Saaduw before it vanished into the abyss, and it only reflects those who are about to die within three moon cycles. Which, if your math is roughly on par, should tell you is pretty much the time Juusan is planned to arrive.”

“And you know this how? That this is the mirror that starts with a U and does such an improbable thing?”

Duo lifted his hand and tapped his forehead twice. “The choir recognizes it. And if that wasn’t enough, it’s written right there, above the bloody thing.”

The finger was now pointing to a filigree of silver in the dark wood.

“That’s writing? It looks like a bunch of chickens were trying to dig out a very determined worm.”

“What it says in the Old Tongue, which was old before you pissant’s figured out how great it was to put splotches of paint on a handy rock, is the name of the mirror, its maker, and the spell used. Which is pretty straightforward.”

“Huh-uh.” 

Wufei tried to sound completely unconvinced. It’d be easier if the mirror wasn’t reflecting something that was already dead and gone. It was oddly chilling, seeing that image.  
And it got worse. As he watched, his reflection changed. He could not see it do so, yet every time his eyes flickered to another spot of his old armor, something had changed; a breastplate was dented, a prong shorn off, the cloth rendered, a dark stain of blood spreading. The face in the reflection bore an expression both stubborn and unflinching as it matched his movement to come stand next to a grim-faced Duo.

“Why is it showing that?” Wufei asked reluctantly, as if even the question might give this piece of magic more relevance than it deserved. “I mean, that armor I’m wearing does not exist any more, and I have no intention of recreating it. I wouldn’t have the time either.”

Duo shrugged. “It’s... how can I say this... urgh, it’s hard explaining things to a mechanized monkey, you don’t have the language. It works a bit like Zero, you know? In fact this is Zero’s precursor.”

Now that was considerably more chilling than even the picture.

Wufei crossed his arms sternly- and felt an unpleasant sensation when the figure in the mirror did not move. The look on their faces, however - hard, arrogant, unflinching - matched like two drops of blood.

“So this piece of crap is telling us we’ll lose? Don’t let it sap whatever moral you have, Jishin, this fight may be deadly, but-“

“No,” said Duo, his face lighting up in real life as he turned towards Wufei (his reflection in the mirror continued to look straight ahead, expression ragged.) “I know it sucks for you, but there’s good news. I couldn’t see Heero’s reflection in here!”

Wufei looked around reflexively. “Heero?”

“He marched through here, looking for god knows what. I ran into him right in front of the mirror- the fact that I tapped his shoulder but my reflection was hanging out alone clued me in quickly on what kind of item this was.”

“So Heero survives? If this thing works.”

“Yes! You see what that means?”

 ”...You just said, Heero survives.”

 “I mean with the fight, metal-head! It means we win!”

Wufei frowned at him, puzzled.

“You and I die, Dragon - and maybe that’s no big surprise when all’s said and done. But if Juusan wins, he’ll burn all of Center down to the primordial magma, and not even Heero can survive that. The fact that Heero doesn’t show up in the mirror means that he does it. He beats Juusan.”

That did put a different spin on it. Wufei could think of quite a few objections to that theory - starting with “does this piece of crap work as advertised” - but the look on Duo’s face determined him to keep his thoughts to himself, indeed, made them moot. The Jishin believed this, and it looked like the thought of buying his revenge against the Scourge at the cost of his own life bothered Duo not a whit. Wufei could resp- could apprec- could understand that.

“Hmf, fine then. So this is how we’re going to die? We don’t look that beaten up. Is this going to fast-forward to us getting disintegrated or something?”

“No, I doubt it. This is more... um...”

It did look like disintegration for a moment... Wufei winced as Shenlong broke in the picture, a burst of energy dissipating like fireflies about him. Duo’s reflection twisted on itself, glass armor turning to smoke and blowing away.

“We shouldn’t let this influence us,” Wufei snapped - yet unable to look away even as the visor tumbled from his reflection’s head. “A warrior always knows he could die in any battle he-...uh...”

He did not see the picture change, yet now it was utterly different. As if this new image had always been there, buried in the first. Wufei stared at his reflection, looking down about two feet at a long-haired bespectacled boy with a pissy look on his face, wearing a trainee’s tunic. He was fifteen in that image, the final year he’d worn that outfit and that expression, before he’d been allowed to go work for Master Li directly and finally had the peace and quiet and level of challenge he required to truly develop. A simple Scale was fixed on his forehead, and a more elaborate one he’d souped up himself was fastened about his chest and forearm.

Next to Wufei stood another youth, one that Wufei also recognized because he’d seen him in the Jishin Hall of Memory a few months back. This Duo was also fifteen, as he’d been just before the attack on his homeworld. Light blue armor, unbound hair and a look of mischief, born of a rebellious nature and a faint sense of loneliness.

“What is this joke?” Wufei’s voice rang out harsh and offended.

It wasn’t the picture of them as children that caused his voice to rasp and shake with anger. It was the fact that the two boys were holding hands, grip white-knuckled as if braving some unseen danger in the darkness together.

When he turned to glower, the Jishin’s face was a picture. He seemed caught completely off guard - but Wufei was not willing to take that on faith, and he certainly did not need to.

“Maxwell, are you doing- are you _influencing_ this in any way? Tell me yes or no!”

“What? No!” Duo looked flabbergasted, and just as irked as he was. “I’m not- I can’t interact with the thing at all, it’s hardwired to show-...”

Then his gaze went hard and strange and distant.

“Ah. Sheeven se veck. Vaan.”

Wufei rolled his eyes. Putting up with Duo Maxwell was a full-time job and burden, putting up with the Halls of the Dead - a concentrate of Jishin, a distilled and purified essence of Trickster - should qualify Wufei for canonization in most religions. He ignored the mutterings and he ignored the strange picture even harder. He impaled his gaze on a few other objects nearby and leaned over to pick up what looked like an antic blaster, ignoring with immense willpower the mirror images that had not moved at all.

“Yeah, see- ” Duo glanced around, realizing his audience had wandered off. In the picture, _finally_ , the two boys had lost each other’s hands. The darkness looked poisonous and Wufei concentrated hard on not looking at the expressions of these- these arcane figments.

“Yeah, so we’re not going to regress to our childhood and hold hands, you’ll be pleased to know.”

“Ecstatic,” Wufei said in a voice that could etch that mirror if it’d been made of glass.

“The threads of fate are... uh... as I said, hard to explain to someone who doesn’t know the first spell in the repertoire of magic primer 101, but in short, this is showing an interpretation- no, that’s not the right word either. Allegory, if you will.”

“Piece of crap, if you will.”

“No it’s not,” Duo ground out. “What it’s showing is that we... are going to find common ground, learn to rely on each other and die side by side-... yeah, okay, maybe it’s a bit broken. It’s thousands of years old.”

Wufei’s snort echoed through the rooms, making something that looked like an electronic harp go _twoing_ in the background. On cue, two people walked through the door.

It was a complete and utter piece of Jishin _crap_... yet Wufei’s eyes flashed from Quatre and Trowa to the fucking piece of shit mirror.

He couldn’t see the Duo’s expression when their two allies also showed up in the reflection, but there was something in the set of his shoulders, in the way he turned his head abruptly away- Wufei looked back down at the junk he was holding.

“What’s this?” Quatre’s step slowed. “Oh.”

Wufei’s anger and certitude that the mirror was bunk plummeted into his boots. That “Oh” had fallen like a tombstone.

“What the hell?” Trowa shielded his eyes as he came up beside Wufei.

The mirror shone like a searchlight. It was shining off of Quatre. It was-... allegory, Wufei remembered. The images were hard to grasp, yet a part of him could still interpret them. In the mirror, Quatre was shining like a star - a star with gears somehow whirring and working inside it, a star-machine... and Trowa was some dim unimportant satellite orbiting at a distance.

Quatre’s eyes flickered up and down, settling briefly on the words above the frame. “Hm. Nice object. You Jishin just loved mucking about in things that were better left unknown.”

“Yeah, that was pretty much our MO,” said Duo, grin firmly back in place. In the mirror, the full armored Jishin was back, arms arrogantly crossed. Wufei was out of the image now.

Trowa was wrinkling his nose and blinking rapidly. “What am I looking at? This thing is giving me a headache.”

“Don’t,” Quatre told his lover quickly. “This contravenes the way your own sight works. Don’t- there’s nothing in here worth knowing.”

Which was what Wufei would have said. Too bad those bloody techno-holies hadn’t smashed this cursed relic of a bygone age of magical monsters before anyone could have seen it.

“Winner, does it show...” Wufei hesitated, he couldn’t come out and say it. Trowa probably didn’t need shielding from the truth, but then again it was obscene to have one’s fate laid out like this. From the way Quatre had asked Trowa to look away, the healer thought so to. “Does it do what it’s supposed to? Show us..you know...” Wufei hedged.

Quatre’s eyes flickered to his lover. “Nothing you didn’t already know,” he answered shortly, equally circumspect. “It works as advertised, sure, but it won’t show us any details that could actually help us-”

“Hot _damn!_ Is that the mirror of Uushanthis? The one that foretells death and disaster?!”

Trust that idiotic crone to barge in at the wrong time and open her mouth.

“Death and disaster?” Trowa started to look back at the mirror, but Quatre caught his arm.

“Come on, everybody, we came to tell you that we found the Orb. It was in the captain’s safe. We should get out of here- no, Svale, it’s too big and it’s also dangerous, we are not taking it with us.”

“But-“

“We need to leave.” Quatre spun her neatly around by twisting her staff and somehow managed to get both of them out of the room before either of them could look fully at the mirror.

Duo and Wufei slowly looked back at each other. Staring at each other in tense silence, weighing a thought they both shared. They’d both seen it.

“More cause for hope...” Duo whispered with a crooked smile.

Wufei didn’t know what to think. But it was a fact that Svale too - the avatar of Center, the old crone who was indestructible as long as the planet had life… She too had not shown up in the mirror.

Heero _and_ Center would survive? (If the stupid crap worked of course.)

That means we win, thought Wufei. Four of us might perish, but Juusan will die too.

Wufei straightened up and walked out of the trophy room, ignoring what the mirror was doing behind him. A few second later, Duo sighed and trailed after him.

Juusan would die. Wufei would love to see the look on the creature’s face when he realized his eons were coming to an end- a tragedy easily on par, for him, with the destruction of both their races. A million deaths indeed, and all justified. Wufei didn’t know if the mirror worked or not; Winner suggested it did. But he found that the notion that Juusan was doomed buoyed him, while the notion of his own death - a virtual certainty for one of the shock troops defending against the Scourge - bothered him not an iota.

The image of two boys holding hands was shoved deep into the back of his mind as “things I refuse to worry about until after I’m dead and buried”. Though it left traces, flares of irritation aimed at all Jishin in general and their last scion in particular. Even though Duo had denied it, Wufei was _certain_ this was somehow his fault. Good thing Juusan was going to show up in a few short months, Wufei wasn’t sure how long he could work next to that- that constant irritation without taking another swing at him for real this time.

 

\---

 

Next Chapter: Jishin lies and truths

 

To get along with a difficult Dragon, you can either fight it or fuck it. Or, if you’re a Jishin, you can attempt to do both.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One of two chapters that was completely blocking me Way Back When, this one had not had a single line written for it before and is thus entirely new material (and now I wished I'd polished it even more, but it'll have to do, my schedule in real life is going into meltdown mode)


	42. Jishin Truths and Lies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning (tags added) rough stuff and some elements of masochism - nothing tidy, for fun or formulated, more the result of a guy who’s issues inbreed with his other issues to produce banjo-playing issues that’d frighten the gene pool of other proper everyday issues.

“Home, sweet Sanctuary!” exclaimed Svale, hopping gratefully off the starship’s ramp. “Who’s got the Orb of Opportunities?”

”-can’t believe we’re going to plug some techno crap into one of my race’s greatest sanctuaries in the whole galaxy-“

“I can’t believe an interesting object of rational science has a chance of connecting to a heap of enchanted rocks.“

”It’s more than rocks-“

“Boys!”

Duo turned to glare at the old fart. 

He knew, without having to look, just from the sheer width of Svale’s leer, that the stupid Dragon had done the same thing at the same time.

“I normally don’t tire of the Maxie-Scaleboy double act, but I’d like to be sure that this thing works before Juusan comes down and blows us all to kingdom come, so tuck them in for now, boyos, and bring the paperweight.”

Wufei moved abruptly in front of Duo to start down the ramp after her, giving Duo the choice to follow lamely or squeeze in beside him.

Option ‘Fuck That’ teleported Duo right next to Svale and made her squawk with surprise. Bonus.

Now Dragon-boy was trailing him, and he was pretending he didn’t mind, since his dignity wouldn’t allow him to use his scale to jet further forward. Duo’s smirk would have frightened a rock. Though not the one barreling towards him.

“Master Duo!” Imp fastened happily onto his worn leathers, and immediately started making faces at Wufei again. Duo could almost feel the idiotic Dragon simmer. 

“At least you didn’t take that _thing_ up with us,” Wufei growled. 

“Animates like Imp need to stay close to mother earth,” Duo said in a ‘only an idiot wouldn’t know that’ tone.

”...Really? What would happen if you took it into space?”

“Svale, do you actually hope this gizmo is going to work?” Duo asked. “If we went through all that-”

“You don’t actually know,” Wufei guessed, stepping closer. “What, it might disintegrate? Explode? Turn back to full stone?”

“Who cares?” Duo snapped.

“Inquiring minds want to know,” the Dragon said in a nasty way. Imp slipped down to the front of Duo’s jerkin.

Duo cupped it quickly in the palm of his hand. “Imp, go take a nap. At the springs.” Evening was falling and at this rate, Duo did not lay heavy odds on the morning rising peacefully without major breakage of mechanical goons.

“Yes, Master Duo.” Imp buzzed away in the right direction at high speed.

“I wonder if it would fare any better than you did up there,” Wufei mused, because it was a well known fact that baby Dragons were lobotomized shortly after birth and their head stuffed full of nuts and bolts. 

Duo’s retaliation (still verbal, but the night was young) sent the Danger meter rising again. The bastard would pay for what happened on the battleship. That was why Duo was so irritated. Though part of it was also a slight sham, and he thought that was the case with the opposing party too. They’d just learned they’d die together -

_two small figures in the dark_

\- in brutal, bloody combat, disintegrated, possibly set on fire first. Being who they were, death bothered them considerably less than the prospect of it occurring in each other’s company, and this snarling and backbiting was just their way of affirming this. It shouldn’t get out of hand-

_holding hands_

\- or if it did, then that Dragon was going to get majorly thumped.

“Boooooys.”

The uncertainty of what Svale might actually manage to do if they continued instated a fragile truce that lasted until they reached the Hearthstone. Duo had reconfigured the Sanctuary so that the keys to the place were now deep underground, nearer the Source, in solid stone caverns reinforced by magic. Because Juusan was not above sending a frigate and a bunch of missiles aimed at their asses ahead of his arrival. The Sweepers would do their best to run interference in any space battle that might materialize overhead. The manning of that constant planetary patrol was why their small team had been scouting for the Cabalist ship with only Howard’s help, trying to find it before calling for reinforcements. That’d been the initial plan. Find the battleship from reverse tracking the something-or-other communication the Cabalists had used to tell Wufei to fuck off. Once found, call in Sweeper troops and attack ships to storm the place. But then the Dragon had done what Dragons were known to do, and in the end reinforcements had not been required.

As soon as the old mummy was leaning over the Hearthstone, the backbiting resumed.

“There is no way a senile race like the Jishin-“

“Watch it, reptile.”

”-could create an interface that will work with this piece of technology.” Wufei was holding it as if the thing was an egg and he was the mother hen. After they’d left the battleship to whichever Cabalist wished to come over and help the injured and bury the dead, Chang had popped the stupid thing into a reader, booted up his laptop and then plunged into the results to the exclusion of anything or anyone else. Like he hadn’t just received a death sentence thirty minutes prior. As if hadn’t seen anything else upsetting in the mirror of Uushanthis. Sitting there, all cool and composed, intelligent eyes narrowed on the readings, focus absolute, a thumb absently caressing his lower lip-

Duo had told him to stop making cooing noises. Wufei had glared. Before he could open his mouth, Heero had grabbed Duo by the arm and dragged him off to another room in the ship. Quatre had been right behind them, he’d probably been the one who told Heero to break up the imminent squabble, the interfering little-

“Hand over the Orb of Orgies, Scale-boy, we need to get this thing rolling,” Svale barked, fingers clicking. 

“Not that I agree with Scale-boy,” Duo put in, “but I also doubt the venerated stones will accept a piece of techno trash.”

“You already said that, Maxie, a lot, now you need to be quiet for awhile or you’ll get my staff up your ass- that goes for you too, Chang.”

“I didn’t say anything, old woman, and I would like to see you try.”

“Later, if you ask me nicely, and you were about to add fuel to the fire. Tintula’s tits, I don’t know what’s gotten into you two. I thought we’d ironed some shit out a couple of weeks ago. Okay...Um, Chang, how do I turn this thing on? I don’t see a switch.”

The look on Wufei’s face was the look of a Dragon discarding the first ten responses that had come to mind as being unhelpful, and finding one that would get this thing working and everybody away from each other sooner rather than later. “It doesn’t have a switch. It’s a capacitor. With a resonance factor.”

“Don’t even pretend that was meant to be helpful information for me, Junior, I’ve been up for twenty four hours running and flung out into space,” Svale ground out.

“You need to give it a charge. Assuming this Jishin relic can then institute a feedback flow, it will-“

“Gotta prime the pump, why didn’t you say so. Maxie, keep what you were going to say behind those teeth of yours and give this thing a little jump-start.”

Duo extended a finger and gave the Orb of Odd Name, now cradled in the Hearthstone’s power centre, a gentle zap.

Nothing happened.

“Nothing happened.”

“Would you know if it did?” Chang asked acidly. “What do you expect to happen? You need to plug it into something in order to build a circuit. You’ve got it stuck on a stone.”

Svale gnashed her teeth - something Duo had never actually seen in real life. “Just-...how much power does it need? To get it going?”

“I was unable to determine that,” Wufei shot back, as stiff as a particularly disapproving board. “There were no notes in the research lab, and I wasn’t able to study it. You wanted to ‘plug it in right away’, to use your own words, despite my telling you-“

“Research lab,” Duo muttered. “Okay, you two, move it or lose it.”

“Wh- _Jishin! Don’t-_ “

Duo let fly.

The Orb jumped into the air like a goosed virgin, but Duo caught it in an etheric grip and hammered it like it was a particularly annoying enemy, power flaring and firing all out. Dust ignited around the Orb and the air smelled like burned tin and ozone. And then-

Duo's fingers suddenly went numb as the massive wave of power he was using flickered out like someone had hit a switch. The rumble, the fire and the crunching pressure of magic above the Hearthstone flipped inside out, roiling _into_ the Orb rather than outward, spiraling like a small hurricane system and disappearing with nothing more than a faint breeze and a crackle.

The Orb of Orgasms now hung, shimmering slightly, in the dead center of the space above the Hearthstone. All around them, the chamber had come alive with a faint, warm hum.

“Yeah, I don’t like that thing,” Duo concluded, shaking his fingers which tingled still from the weird power drain.

The next moment the world shifted and a wall danced around him and hit him in the back.

“Are you _insane?!_ ”

Took him long enough, Duo thought muzzily, and realized he’d been trying to get into a fight with Wufei for, oh, at least the past half day, ever since-

_mirror of darkness with two_

\- since that humiliating space walk thingie. 

“Hey, it worked.”

“That’s not the point! You- you could have destroyed it!”

“Don’t be stupid, I knew it could take it.”

“You-... that’s bullshit!”

“Can’t lie, can I,” said Duo with a suave smirk.

Ahh, the look on Chang’s face. ”How-...”

”The weapon’s lab,” Duo said, gripping the hands on his jacket and using the strength of mountains to casually rip them away. “All those arcane weapons lying around completely drained, next to sensors to validate the results and techno weapons all shiny and charged up. They’d been testing their toy, using it to parry magical weapons and using it to juice up their own. If it could take a full blast from-... from some of the weapons I saw up there, it could take a little love pat from me.”

Chang’s eyes flitted towards Duo’s carry-all, left near the entrance. He’d noticed Duo pick up one of those weapons in particular. No matter. He’d have no interest in something like that. The eyes fastened on Duo’s again, re-evaluating. The fact that Duo had actually thought it through before blasting seemed to surprise the moron. Though not to make him any less angry.

“And if you’d been wrong?’

“Then we’d have a broken piece of techno junk instead of a useless piece of techno junk.”

“And what about your Hearthstones?” Wufei ground out. “You realize-“

“If I had to, I would have gated back to Iwa No Hone and dug through the bones of my dead until I found the Heart of Luaksher Mountain or some other ancient power, and I would have brought that back instead,” Duo said softly. ”Part of me still thinks I should, because I can’t trust techno bullshit for crap.”

In the loaded silence that followed, Svale’s “Shit!” rang out like a shot.

“Did he break it?” Wufei snarled, shoving Duo against the wall and stomping over.

“No, no, the Orb of Operettas is working fine. We have a fully powered up and stable Sanctuary, yay, good job one and all, but we have another problem now.” Svale was looking somberly at the hearthstone she was perched on, the disrespectful goat. “Hmm, I think I know how to fix it, hopefully before Juusan comes and blows us all to hell and back. You, Scale-boy-“

“Chang. My name is-“

“Hold out your hand like this.” Svale held out a fist, thumb out and up, then brought it partially down so that it so it hovered over the fingers loosely folded towards the palm. 

“Why-“

“Just do it! We don’t have much time!”

Chang complied gracelessly. “Why am I pretending to grip a detonator?” he groused.

“Maxie! Come over here!”

“If something’s wrong with the Orb of Overrated, I can’t help,” Duo said, sauntering over.

“Shut up and do the same as Chang. Same hand.”

“Er-“

“Ask why and the only bouillon base I’ll be using for my stews from now on will be my undies.”

Duo wearily held up his hand. It was just easier to comply with Svale than to argue. “What is this? I don’t know any magical cantrips that starts with this gesture, it’s not going to be able to complete the arcane binding without-“

“Okay, now both of you - keep that fist up, Chang - take a step towards each other.”

They stayed motionless, staring at her.

“Come on! You’re too far apart for a thumb war!”

”Old woman-” snarled Wufei just as Duo said, “For fuck’s sake-“

“That’s the easiest way I can think of,” Svale shot back with a crocodile smile and eyes hard in their nest of wrinkles. She jumped off the pedestal, scurried over and glared up at them. “Look, I don’t know what you guys saw in the Mirror of Uushanthis-“

“That stupid thing was broken.”

“You keep telling yourself that, Dragon.”

”-but it doesn’t matter!” Svale screeched, staff perilously close to knocking against both their heads. “You need to sort your shit out _now!_ I know you’re not really aiming to kill each other, but sooner or later one of you is going to open his big gob and say something that is really going to hurt _an ally!_ I don’t want to have to be an Agony Aunt when I and everybody else around here needs to synch up and kick immortal ass in a few months! So this is what we’re going to do. I am going to go to bed. I need my rest or I am really going to lose it. I’m so tired I can’t even enjoy seeing you two slap-fighting right now. You boys are going to stay here, as this is now one of the three most shielded and spell-jammed places in the planet. Or go visit one of the other two Hearthstone chambers, I don’t care! But you two are not coming out of here until you _sort it out!_ ”

The last order echoed through the corridors leading back up to the shack riding atop the Sanctuary like a flea clinging to a dog. 

Duo snorted softly and waited for Wufei to stomp away too. It’d be good to check the Sanctuary spell lines, make sure this whizz-bang piece of circuits wasn’t doing anything funky to the arcana in here. Granted, it was Duo’s magic that it was amplifying and feeding into the Sanctuary, but still-

Wufei took a few steps away, then unexpectedly turned. His glare could cut steel, yet he wasn’t leaving.

“Gotta problem, reptile?”

“Yes,” Wufei ground out, “and so do you.”

“That’s a given. Can you leave now?“

“She’s right.” The words looked like they’d tasted as sweet as rotten garbage on his tongue. “We do need to sort- to resolve this.”

A soft thrill of energy crackled up Duo’s frame, banishing tiredness and the last vestiges of that eery weightless feeling that’d clung to him since he’d stepped out into outer space and landed on the battleship. “Oh, Dragon, anytime, anyplace. Though maybe not here. Svale might have said this chamber was protected-“

“We cannot afford to fight,” Wufei ground out. “Not seriously.”

“Aww, I’ll be sure not to hit you in your pretty face.”

Wufei treated that as if it was so far beneath his dignity he’d need a telescope to sneer at it. “My race had means of resolving these tensions. Duels. Stated rules, which honorable - well, there might be a problem there, but at least you might be considered _disciplined_ enough to abide by the simplest ones. With a bit of practice. This would allow us-“

“Right,” said Duo, tuning out. Play a game where the Dragon would have the advantage, as Duo would spend more time remembering the rules than laying waste to his enemy. And a stagnant pretend fight was the last thing Duo’s riled feelings wanted, Sounded as boring as the missionary position. 

“Of course, there’s the other way of easing tension,” said Duo on the heels of that thought. 

Wufei’s lips twitched back into an aggravated snarl at being interrupted in his recital of rules forty to forty-five, or whatever he’d been doing. 

Duo leaned a hip against the Hearthstone, propped himself back against his hands and stretched out his legs before him languorously. 

Wufei gave them a long and suspicious stare.

Duo sighed, put away the sexy pose, planted an irritated fist on his hip and leaned forward. “I’m suggesting we hit the hay together, Dragon.” 

Wufei’s eyebrows shot up. “The-...”

“Oh right. How would the techno phrase go? It’s got something about fish in it. Koi? Koi-tush? Nai no kami, fucking, in short.”

There was a long, a very long silence. Which was the diametrical opposite of what Duo had expected and was going for. Duo had just wanted the dragon to go off on a rant, which was always amusing, or fight him for real, which was even better. 

Stone gods and golems...was Wufei actually considering it...? 

“Why?” was all Wufei said after that long pause, expression unreadable.

Duo let out the breath he’d been holding. Several thousand ancestors were echoing the same question, setting up one hell of a stereo effect.

It’d been half a joke until now (then again, even a Jishin psycho like himself could master enough mathematics to know that this meant it also half wasn’t). But now that it might actually be for real...Duo mentally spun towards the inner depths of his soul and leveled the kind of maddened scream only a lunatic could let loose in a highly secured institution for the homicidally insane. **Let me have this you bastards!!**

Duo thundered that order into the Halls of the dead...only to have it echo around a lot. His deceased had gone back to their plotting almost immediately. 

**Huh…guys?**

Dissonant views came trickling back. A technologist, a wired goon. Yuck. Still, Duo was young, he’d been working hard. It could be good for him if he kicked back. **Just remember,** said the last few wisps of thought before the Halls became a crypt again, **we do need the idiotic youngling alive, so do not injure him too much.**

...Duo had been a late bloomer and had not discovered his sexuality on Iwa No Hone. With that somewhat chilling admonition echoing in his ears, and a few flashes of what might be behind it - some of the less savory not-for-kids bedtime stories of what could happen to travelers in fairy mounds… for once, Duo thought his disconnect with his people might be a good thing.

All this mental gymnastic had, with the ease of six long years of arcane schizophrenia, only taken the time of a slow blink. What had been Chang’s question? Oh yes, Why, though not with the same tone or intent as the hallowed dead. 

“Why? Come on, let’s not beat about the bush. Haven’t you noticed that every time we start thumping each other it ends up close to the gutter, if not rolling around in it? You’re drop dead gorgeous, so am I, we’re both available, nobody else is interested within a hundred square miles of this dump unless you want to make all of Svale’s dreams come true. Why not?”

Wufei merely looked at him. Still so completely calm! Well, there was deadly tension and a feeling he was two inches away from homicide, but that was the way he asked Duo to pass the salt over lunch, so it didn’t signify. 

“Why. Me. There cannot be two mortals in the galaxy who despise each other more.”

“But that’s the whole point! Haven’t you ever heard of a hate fuck?”

”...No. I haven’t. If I had, I would have immediately asked ‘did a Jishin invent it’?”

“Considering what we thought of other races, ourselves and any form of romantic entanglement, I’d say we probably did,” admitted Duo, scratching an ear. “So what about it?” 

“Why?!”

Duo jerked his upper body in a wild flail of a shrug, energy rushing through him. “Because we need a way of- of one-upping each other and ripping into each other that doesn’t involve death or dismemberment.”

“I pity your previous partners, I really do.”

“Because you really, really hate me, Chang,” Duo added, levering his hips away from the Hearthstone to saunter forward. “Because I made you go crying to Juusan. Because you crawled in the dirt at my feet.” 

Wufei’s eyes widened and his nostrils flared, but he held a grip on his temper.

“Because you said that after we defeat the Scourge, my life and death were yours,” Duo murmured, “but we’ll both be dead then, so don’t you want to take it out in installments beforehand?” He stopped five feet away, running fingers down his chest and then his leg until he was leaning forward, hand braced on his knee, braid swaying in an open taunt.

“How your race managed to survive-”

“Well it won’t be doing that for much longer, so when all’s said and done...” Duo shrugged, straightening up. “Really, when you think about it, what does it matter? Who’s going to judge us? And if it doesn’t matter now, it’ll matter even less three months down the road.”

“You’re actually serious about this?”

“You’re actually considering it? I thought you’d run away like a frightened virgin by now.”

There was not a flicker of change in Wufei’s expression. Arms still crossed over his chest, he walked forward.

“I am not a virgin,” he said, so mildly it was a downright slap in the face. “And I am certainly not frightened of you.”

Duo let out a puff of air, not bothering to turn as Wufei started to make a circuit around him. “Since we’re about to get it all out… can I just say, you are so much fun to fight with.” Nobody else here could dish it out or take it half as well as this fucking Dragon.

That earned him a snort from over his left shoulder.

Wufei came into view again. He was raking Duo over with a completely analytical look, Duo almost expected to see Shenlong flash information into his left eye. Duo posed, sticking his arms out, more ballsy than sexy.

“You seem to think I’m prudish. Or nervous. Or self-deluded,” Wufei said clinically, drawing up before him. “I might abhor you on a personal level, but I am not blind to the fact that you have a body I would have gladly gone to war for, back in the old days.”

Duo had to fight his jaw to keep it from dropping like a ninny. He hadn’t really thought about it- but he should have realized, because he knew his Dragon well enough by now, that Wufei’s previous red-faced snarling reactions to Duo’s innuendos, accidental or otherwise, had been anger and offense at who was offering the pass, rather than a prim horror at the pass itself. Why was Duo so surprised? Wufei was a healthy guy after all- but he’d always appeared so- so ascetic, so focused on his revenge, so above these kind of desires. Then again, Duo had put this in the context of taking their mutual frustrations out on each other, rather than suggesting either of them was succumbing to a weakness of the flesh. That… did actually jive with Duo’s understanding of the ridiculous armor-rigged reptile. 

“You’re actually considering it. I didn’t know you had it in you, Chang.”

He reached out a hand - slowly, just in case. Wufei didn’t budge. Duo’s fingertips brushed white silk and he didn’t get punched.

“As you said. What does it matter.” Wufei’s words were curt, he seemed to be staring at something a little over Duo’s shoulder. “There’s no-one left alive in this galaxy who’d care, as far as I’m concerned.” True, he didn’t carry his dead with him. Except metaphorically.

“Savage freedom, isn’t it.”

Wufei’s silence was its own brand of ascent. 

Duo inched forward - hopefully selling the slow move as teasing and seductive rather than disbelieving and cautious. He stopped at a dozen inches, hand now resting flat against the smooth tunic over Wufei’s chest, feeling a faint prickle on his palm which would be Shenlong’s residual field. The cloth was warm from the heat of the skin beneath.

“I’ll make it easy for you anyway, shall I?” Duo could tell his mouth was running, and he knew what he was saying, but it was as if it was another body of his, just a few inches to his left, doing the trash talking while the real one was orbiting that feeling of smoothness and faint warmth beneath his fingertips. “I’ll let ya plant your conquering hero’s flag on my ass, since that’s probably what gets you warmongering Dragons revved up. Feel free to boast about it if you want. Or not. If you’d rather nobody know you stooped this low, no problem, I don’t kiss and tell, especially since Svale will then stalk us in case of an encore. Really, when you think of it, is there any downside to you? You’ll even get to-”

“Stars and void, Jishin, do you ever shut up?” Wufei asked, focusing abruptly on Duo.

“Make me,” Duo whispered, leaning forward with a leer, lips invitingly close.

He got a callussed mitt on his face in response.

He went Mf! - Wufei swung him around. In a flash of energy they were on the far side of the chamber. Duo found himself thudding against the wall with that hand on his mouth still.

From the vile smirk on Wufei’s mug, he knew that this wasn’t what Duo had in mind and he was enjoying that fact immensely.

“That’s better. Now, unlike you, I’ll be straightforward, shall I?”

Duo could have broken the hold, but he did no more than blink.

“Is this-”

Air rippled as Wufei’s grip shifted like lightning, grabbed Duo by the shoulder, spun him and slammed him face first against the wall.

“- is _this_ really want you want?” Wufei was real close and right up behind him, hard fists gripping Duo’s forearms and holding them pinned to the rock of the chamber. “If this was just a mindscrew of yours, Jishin, time to back out now, because I not in the mood for your usual-”

His words were bitten off in a hiss as Duo pushed back from the wall into full body contact with that smooth silken tunic and rubbed against it. The way his back, his armor, slid smoothly against it without catching - and the rock-hard body beneath that hadn’t flinched back a fraction when Duo had shoved against him. The contrast, smooth and silky, hard and strong, sent Duo’s nerve endings into overdrive. 

Wufei’s words right next to his ear were tight, stiff, Duo could almost see that muscle in the Dragon’s jaw clench. “If this is an attempt to manipulate me-”

“It’s not,” Duo said. Shenlong’s chest piece - as tough and steely as its owner, another contrast to the silk - was poking into his back. His skin felt very sensitive right now, he bet he could draw every gear, button and switch on that piece of metal. “Promise. I can’t lie, right?”

“So this is just out of sheer frustration and contempt, that’s all?

“Oh Chang-” Duo started to say-

It reared up and hit him out of absolutely nowhere.

The derisive declination of ‘yes, of course’ lay stillborn in his throat, physically blocked by a memory. It wasn’t even that vision from that bloody mirror, no, it was from before, long before, the first time he’d laid eyes on this man. A figure of both grace and power landing near Duo in the hidden springs, weapon drawn, eyes full of darkness, strength, certainty. When Duo had saved the newcomer from Heero’s wrath, he’d had all sorts of reasons, really, so many good reasons, and they were all happenstance, born after the fact; shoring up the simple unexplained resolve to not let something so glorious, pure, fierce and alone vanish from the galaxy. When he’d saved the Dragon’s life, tasted his blood, wrapped himself around Wufei’s injured body and mind, the cohort of plans and reasons for his crazy charity continued to trail after the truth, the simple unvarnished truth. Here was a soul like his own, but also unlike his; whole, not tattered; proud and strong, not ready to sell himself by inches if that’s what it took. The pain they shared, Wufei didn’t let it hound him, he had fearlessly taken it and burned it on a pyre to light his way. 

That moment near the fresh water spring… a part of Duo was still caught in that moment like the fragile sparkle held captive at the heart of a diamond, he had a feeling he might be caught there for as long as he lived… So fortunately not all that long. Three months tops, right? But that moment was stopping him from uttering his jeering “Of course I’m only fucking you out of sheer loathing, stupid worm,” or whatever lies had been about to come out of his mouth. Because of the Oath of Blood and Stone.

This was actually the first time the oath had triggered. Despite intense grilling by everybody, from every aspect of his experience with Juusan to what kind of underwear he was wearing (Svale, naturally) - _this_ was when it kicked in?! Stupid spell! It was supposed to make life easier! Not more complicated! This- _thing_ he was planning to do with the Dragon was fine, this was perfect, quick relief, a distant touch of something beautiful - stealing like a thief under pretense of hate something that Duo was unwilling to name. But he needed that pretense! He needed this lie! Duo didn’t have time for this shit, no time for two small figures crushed in darkness holding hands, no time for the memory of a man, all beauty and danger and pain, pointing a gun at him and not firing- Duo just wanted to get laid! Stupid cock-blocking spell couldn’t even give him that?!

The moment stood poised like a knife - but if Duo Maxwell was anything, it was quick witted.

“- what else could it be?” 

There’d barely been a hitch between the start and end of that sentence. The laugh in particular was awfully convincing. Duo was quite proud of it.

Then he remembered with a thunderclap of tension that in every question asked until now, the ever suspicious Wufei had been very, very good at pinning Duo down to a yes/no answer.

Fuck. Fuck! Wufei was going to rephrase the question, and then Duo would have to make a very good show of chickening out - _fuck!_ \- and not get screwed into the wall, because no way would Chang Wufei want to hear that a crazed Jishin had developed some tiny stupid masochistic crush on him. Goddamn! Why?! They’d never before been the kind to overanalyze their mutual repulsion, so why bother scrutinizing this now - especially seeing as how they were both doomed-

Wufei drew in a breath.

He let it go abruptly, the air stirring the loose hair around Duo’s ear.

“Right.” It was barely a mutter. “Doesn’t matter in final. We’ll be dead soon anyway.”

Duo stared hard at a fleck of mica in the wall an inch from his face.

It wasn’t just the words and the lack of pointed follow-up question. The tone had been very odd. Almost like a dead echo of what Duo himself had been thinking of at the exact same time.

Did he just-

No. Hah. No way.

Right?

...Duo realized that it could take him decades of arcane research to figure out what might lurk behind those dozen words, and they only had a few months left. So did he want to dig into an unknown feeling that was almost certainly not there and could seriously blow up in both their faces if it was...? Or did he want to get fucked into next week?

There was only really one thing to say.

“Chang, do you actually have anything in your pants, or is this cute cuddle your idea of sex?”

There was a half second of a thunderous silence - then a snort and a hard press forward slammed him into the rock.

“Are you really in a position to insult me right now?”

And there it was! So easy! Duo laughed out loud because it was _so easy!_ They’d been doing this dance for ages. In fact this was part of what bound them too, because alongside the other stuff Duo did not want to delve into, was the simple fact that this fucking Dragon _fucking irritated him!_ And it was so easy now to tell him _and_ still get laid _and_ ignore anything else that might be lurking there that wouldn’t matter when their atoms would be dispersing on the wind together.

“I’m quaking in my lil’ black boots. Oh, wait, no I’m not.”

“Rein in your usual sarcasm or I’ll leave you to hump your precious stones and go find someone I don’t want to strangle to lay with.”

Was there- was there an extra zing to Wufei’s snarls, a little hint of relief at falling back to their usual patter? Who cared! Maybe he didn’t want to think about this too closely either, maybe he just wanted to get laid at no cost. It was all good. It really didn’t matter.

In the same spirit, Duo playfully pushed back hard, ramming himself against Wufei in a way that was probably not all that pleasurable. There would be time for that later and besides, Chang could take it.

Disappointingly, instead of going ‘oof!’ and backing away, or better yet, doubling over a bruised sternum - or crotch - the bloody goon merely growled as his boots skidded a scant inch across stone, and then power hummed as he stood fast. Prickles ran up and down Duo’s back like a dozen little kitten kisses as the scale’s field sparked a reaction from his spirit armor. Shenlong was being sweet! Less so its owner who slammed Duo’s forearms back against the rock. He tried to do the same to Duo’s body - but Duo wasn’t that cheap a date, Wufei was going to have to pay his way with a bit of effort. Duo’s muscles and magic flexed, keeping him perfectly poised and steady a foot from the rock, propped by his pinned forearms. He sniggered.

Wufei’s right leg scythed out and kicked Duo’s ankle hard, making him falter in his pose and widening his stance as his foot skittered over a bit of loose scree. Oh, nice one. Duo obligingly kept his legs wider apart, even though it made it harder to engage his core and keep from ploughing back face first into the rock. Not the best of positions. For bracing, that is. Best position to put his ass on display, though, and from the brief pause and silence, Duo could just imagine a hot pair of eyes dropping down into the space between them and getting a good look. 

“You better not regret this later,” Wufei growled, pressing against him hard. Duo once more teasingly refused to let himself get slammed into rock (the night was young, plenty of time to collect bruises later, though he’d prefer them hard and fingershaped on his hips.) 

“The only thing I’ll regret was not doing this a month ago.” He angled as he pushed back. His skin was a cat’s tongue of sensation, his armor had thinned until it was sheer fabric. Duo pressed his rump back into contact with that oh-so-smooth silk… and there was a hardness there, finding its place against the swell of his ass, that was ever so promising.

“I’d have killed you if you’d tried this a month ago. I should probably kill you now.”

“Oh I’m hoping you will,” Duo murmured, doing a full body shimmy. Chang still had his forearms pinned against the chamber wall, but the pressure he was exerting was no longer trying to nail the rest of Duo to the cold uncaring rock, it was more like he was trying to shove his way right into Duo’s skin. 

“Fuck, you’re a lunatic.”

The way they were pressed, the growled words painted Duo’s neck and right ear with little whispers and thrills. He tipped and turned his head on instinct to catch that last truth in his own mouth- 

\- was it he who jerked away at the last second or Wufei who turned his head and pushed him forward again? Didn’t matter. No kissing, right, kissing was what lovers did, not fuck-enemies or whatever they were going to be. Fair enough. Better than fair, perfect. Duo’s darker instincts were getting a little too much into this love-hate-without-the-love stuff.

Finally one of Wufei’s hands left Duo’s arm and dropped to touch him, arm curving around his waist to ruck up the clothes over his belly. His mystical glass armor, now light and fine as chiffon, caught in calluses, fled from rough fingers and allowed the latter to reach skin above his navel, the epidermis of Duo’s waist electrifying under the touch.

“Isn’t this better than killing each other?” Duo’s stance wobbled, caught between pushing back into the hard wall of muscles and the hard length of an erection, and pressing forward into that touch. 

“Wait until I’m done with you to judge that.” At odds with his words, the hand dragged across skin - hard, not a caress per se, but it didn’t punish it, didn’t pinch or twist or claw or bruise. Until Duo rammed back hard again, making Chang stagger back a step - and certainly mistreating at least one sensitive area, judging from the faint irritated grunt. Then the hand on his waist gripped down like steel, holding him locked still against Wufei’s body.

“Stop that or you will collect a lot more than bruises.”

“Hah! I can take what you dish out, Chang. I like it rough.”

“Please, I’ve seen your armor. I figured that out already.”

It was meant as a throw-away line, but it made Duo shiver with three different flavors of delight and sudden heart-catching vulnerability. He’d had quite a few lovers in the last few years; some were marks, objectives, others for fun in a love-’em-and-leave-’em-before-they-notice-anything-odd routine that’d become second nature, run and hide, run and hide… 

He didn’t need to run and hide anymore. There were no more shadows he needed to crawl into. Wufei had seen the real Duo, the last Jishin, and he’d seen more-

_dancing teasing eyes of a long dead boy in blue armor holding hands with_

\- he’d seen their death together in the mirror. Even the future was no longer a place to hide in, short and illuminated as it was. Duo could be himself in ways he’d never been before. Hell, the thought he might let slip hints of the crazy feelings he harbored towards the Dragon didn’t even scare him that much anymore. Chang already knew he was a nutty Jishin masochist with way too many ghosts, plots, emotions and contradictions stuffed into his skull. A few more of the latter wouldn’t scare him off. If he figured out Duo liked him almost as much as he also disliked him, well, he’d just make sure Duo was still reliable in the fight to come, then he’d give that hilariously stuffy stern look of his and forget about it, and this wild freedom of a three month long ‘last night on earth’ would still be theirs. 

Turned out, what Duo thought was raging desire up to now had merely been the slow burn of the fuse smoking and sputtering its way towards a large incendiary bomb. The thought of being the real Duo right here, right now - no masks, no dead to care at this point, no judgement… He ignited. 

Duo ripped away from the hand holding him against Wufei, leaned hard against the wall and canted his hips back. “Come on, Chang, in me, _now!_ ”

There was a faint creak of tendons as Chang’s head jolted up - oh yeah, didn’t need to be psychic to know where his gaze had been nailed a second ago. “ _Now?_ Without- Are you crazy?”

“Completely and quite clinically, what’s your point?” Duo craned his neck to see over his shoulder. 

A hard hand gripped his forearm once more - the skin was starting to pick up pretty fingerprint bruises at last - and spun him around lightning fast, making his head spin (the paucity of blood in his brain right this second might have been a contributing factor). Duo blinked into a pair of hot, angry black eyes a foot away from his face. 

“My point is that I am not going to injure someone I’m going to use against the Scourge, you caterwauling cretin.”

Duo let his head tilt a little to one side. “Then what were you proposing?” 

The hand grinding his left shoulder blade into rock transferred its grip to his face, pressing hard on the mandible, and Wufei’s cruel uncaring smirk was worthy of one of Duo’s own race. “I was going to put that mouth to a better use than you usually do.” 

“Oh we can so do that next time,” Duo said enthusiastically while thoughts ran through his blood like inky darkness, of that hard grip in his hair, forcing him to take a cock down his throat. “But right now I want you to fuck me, Dragon. Do I need to repeat it in your heathen lingo? Oh, don’t worry your pretty little head, you can’t actually hurt me. Well, no more than I want you to. After all, you do know who and what I am.”

Wufei opened his mouth, but the possible objection or insult that went along with the sneer on his face strangled itself into a ‘wha’ and derailed into a sound of revolt deep in his throat. Beneath his gaze, his fingers, the black of the spirit armor was dissolving and curling away like smoke up a chimney. Dropping one last barrier, almost the most trifling of them truly, seeing how much more of Duo Wufei had already become acquainted with. Duo smirked, relaxing beneath the hard grip still pinning him, his body coiled and white, aroused and yes, quite beautiful, he knew what he looked like. Muscles sleek and taut rather than sculpted and built, skin pale and unmarred, eternally repaired from all abuse, even the self-inflicted, no imperfection revealed by the armor slinking away like the half-alive thing that it was, bar the beautiful reddening beneath the hard grip on his arm, a delicious contrast.

It never even occurred to him that Wufei would jump away from what regular humans might consider a freaky sight. Wufei didn’t, of course, didn’t even shift his hands or loosen his grip pushing Duo back against the rock. His eyes flitted to where the armor was crawling away, down the plane of Duo’s abs, to the prick standing tall and waving happily at him, all friendly like- Oh so wonderful, the way his expression didn’t twitch, didn’t change, the sneer still sculpted on like a fine work of art even as the eyes lingered, weighed and judged without any hint of embarrassment. Right, not a virgin, not a prude and certainly not scared of Duo, check, check and check. Lovely, just lovely. 

Then the Dragon did something that reminded Duo once again that he only had half a handle on the weird critter. Instead of jumping on Duo and ravishing him in the best of styles, Wufei pushed away, with a pressure and creak of bones as the shove ground Duo’s arm and head into the rock behind him briefly as he was released. Wufei took an unhurried step back and lifted his hand to the small buttons near the top of his tunic.

Duo’s eyebrows climbed up his forehead like they were racing each other to the top (and it didn’t even occur to him to hide his surprise, to hide his feelings). The Dragon didn’t need to strip, as long as he could get that erection out of his pants. Duo would have thought Chang would relish the power dynamic of being dressed while hammering into his foe, the message it sent. Instead of taking Duo’s striptease as a surrender, he’d taken it as a challenge- oh right. Duo’s head clonked back lightly against the rock as he rolled his eyes up towards the ceiling. Right, challenge, probably the first word baby Dragons said right after ‘mama’.

The strong fingers paused in their work with little more than a tantalizing sliver of golden skin revealed. Wufei looked away abruptly and pointedly off to one side. Duo twitched and followed his gaze. The corridor leading out to the rest of the Sanctuary was empty. Oh, but-

“Yikes, right, my brain is definitely broken,” Duo chuckled, gesturing in that direction. Under a caress of his mind in the etheric plane of the Mothersong, rock flowed and shaped itself, sealing off the chamber and reinforcing some of the arcane protection to boot, to hide them from any far-sensing. “She said she was going to sleep, but I think she can smell hanky panky a mile away. No interruptions.” Especially not Svale-shaped.

The clonk of armored boots being discarded hadn’t distracted him. The rustle of cloth and the quick rippling _flick_ of small buttons being undone was a bit harder to ignore. Duo licked his lips while checking the integrity of the room once last time, knowing that once he looked back at what was going on a couple of feet away, the only thing that would be able to distract him were Juusan’s arrival or the sun going nova.

Wufei undid the last button with a practiced hand and pulled off the tunic. Duo stared with unabashed fascination at the way the silk cloth pulled out from beneath Shenlong’s metal piece, even though the Scale had always appeared to adhere to the cloth and the muscles beneath and looked completely immovable. Duo had assumed Chang took the armor off to do mundane stuff like shower, but apparently he did not have to. Neither did he need to remove it to screw annoying Jishin. Duo snorted softly in amusement. Really, neither of them were ever truly entirely naked and defenseless now, were they… So fun, how they were such a match, he wondered if he should mention it to get the Dragon riled up a tad. Wufei’s preternatural calm was both fascinating and irking. 

That thought and most of the rest of his ability to cogitate went flying out the metaphorical window when Wufei undid the soft belt at his waist and discarded his pants and some kind of folded cloth underwear as if it was the most natural thing to do. Shit, but the guy had balls - very nice ones too. Duo stared down at the hard cut lines of the Dragon’s cock and almost - almost - changed his mind about going down on his knees to get his mouth on that. Bloody hell, he’d thrown that ‘next time’ out casually and the Dragon hadn’t peeped about it; Chang better keep that unspoken promise, or else Duo would make it his second holy mission in life to get under that golden skin again to the point where Wufei would have no other choice but to fight him or fuck him once more.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Duo purred. He was lounging against the rock, one foot braced against it, knee bent as he leaned back and got an eyeful. Wufei was more muscular than a magic user, but not quite as ripped as Heero. The Scale provided a lot of his strength, his body was carved out of golden wood to be a weapon of precision, of endurance, able to whip around and apply the Scale’s power with micrometer precision even after a whole day of gruelling combat at the end of months of campaign. Duo’s arms were propping him against the stone wall, brazenly stuck behind his back, flaunting his own unabashed nudity. A great pose to put himself on display. Not so good to casually lift a hand to his mouth and make sure he wasn’t drooling, stone and bone, please let him not be drooling, that’d be embarrassing. 

“Nice. Very nice. You should fight like that, since the scale protects you anyway, might give us a thin edge against the Scourge - or at least against some of the troops he’ll send against us. So, Chang, how do you want me?”

“Silent,” Wufei said in a way that suggested he no longer believed in miracles but still prayed for the impossible at times, as a matter of form. There was still anger prowling around in his tone, tightening his frame, even as his eyes raked up and down Duo’s body and the air started to sizzle between them. He wants it, he wants it, Duo’s soul sang, and he hates that he wants it and he wants to hate it and this is going to be perfect.

Duo opened his mouth to mine that some more, but Chang cut him short by grabbing his shoulder again and turning him around. Then pressure on his collarbone sent him sinking to his knees with a thump. Duo didn’t have time to ponder this turn of events, Wufei was already crouched behind him, one hand dropping to grip Duo’s hip - yes! Finally! - the other sinking lower, hard and uncompromising over Duo’s ass, towards the ripple and dip of his hole. 

“I do not have any lubricant,” Wufei bit out. “So you had better be serious when you said-” 

His own words cut out as he felt the edges of Duo’s asshole and obviously noticed that things were a lot more slick and loose down there than he’d expected.

“Chaaa-aaa-aaang,” Duo sing-songed to the three starting notes of a Jishin children’s ditty about a moronic human lumberjack who gets eaten by a Trickster’s tree, not that the Dragon would get the reference. “My armor can stitch up wounds seamlessly in seconds, clean my blood - also kills any opportunistic germ or virus dead, in case you were concerned. It can change to any form or consistency anywhere on my body- do I need to draw you a picture? It’ll be highly pornographic, don’t let Svale see it.”

Savage and quick, he shoved himself down on the fingers still feeling about. 

Muscles in the hand penetrating him and the one still holding his hip jumped and tensed, but Duo ground down like a man possessed - _stretch burn fuck yes at last!_ \- and did not let the digits escape. Made his point. Though at the back of his mind, a trickle of a different kind of pleasure, private and tiny and warm and faintly embarrassed at itself: that Wufei had actually taken the time to check, and possibly stretch him if it’d been required, rather than carelessly taking the opportunity to just ram in and fuck without care or consequence. Sure, Wufei had said he didn’t want to injure an ally, however dubious. The heart of what was happening right now between them was that Duo did not even feel inclined to analyze any more how much that was true and how much it might be an excuse on par with his own.

“Now what?” Duo asked, gyrating on the fingers as much as the grip on his hip allowed, jerking and sending sparks flying up and down his spine. 

Fingers left Duo’s ass and were replaced by the awesome hot silky head of a truly lovely cock. The hand on his hip was now a steel grip stopping Duo from moving and also gifting him with the bruises he’d been hoping for, firing pain signals up his nerves to put the pleasure in a chokehold and roughly mate with it. 

A faint sense of wonder that Wufei was still in control and mindful of not causing serious injury. Maybe that was- maybe that was something significant in the ‘don’t examine too closely’ category, or maybe it was just part of the powerplay Duo had been expecting after all. Where was the put-down opportunity in hurting a masochist, right? Maybe Wufei’s true message here was, I’ll hurt you only if _I_ want to, I’m not here for your pleasure, only for mine. Duo groaned in sheer ecstasy at the thought. Poor Wufee didn’t have the mental agility to realize that there was nothing he could do that wouldn’t get Duo off at this point; Duo was used to being a sock puppet after all, and that this was now his own choice, for his own reasons and with his very own Dragon were already enough to get his nerves exploding like a thousand tiny suns. 

“Now we’re getting somewhere.” He was fighting the grip on his hip as much for the pleasurable bite of bruising as for the denied pleasure of ramming down on the hardness penetrating him by inches. “How do you want it? Do you want me to scream? To beg? To-”

“I really do want you to be quiet,” Wufei grumbled, voice taut and not aimed right at Duo’s ear. Duo imagined he was looking down at where their bodies now joined. 

“Begging and screaming it is. Come on, you mechanically-minded reptile, get on with it!” Foreplay was like kissing, it did not belong here, not this time anyway. Maybe next time, after this quick hard ride had established they could have sex and still mostly entirely despise each other. 

Finally - finally! - Wufei pushed in to the hilt with one long steady thrust, and then pulled out and shoved in again. Duo’s fingernails were scoring the rock like it was made of clay, he didn’t even care what garbled words were falling out of his mouth at this point. Chang picked up a rhythm, hard but not savage, still in control, not even deigning to take the permission to ravish that had been offered, while the free hand reached out, grabbed Duo by the throat and brought the Jishin’s body back against his shoulder. Not hard enough to choke, but hard enough to be a promise that this would happen if Duo said anything irritating. Duo could only whine, the new angle didn’t quite satisfy and that seemed to please Chang - and that also pleased Duo’s dark doppelganger in turn, it was writhing in abject ecstasy. 

In out, in out. Duo’s arcane control over his body had loosened the muscles, his manifested spirit had summoned complex molecules out of thin air to slicken his ass, but man it still _pulled_ and _pushed_ and _burned_. Tight-hot each time Wufei shoved in, like a small punch inside where it could not get more secret and intimate. It hurt a bit, a hurt that Duo would bet he’d find pleasurable even if he wasn’t who he was. For seconds, minutes - felt like hours, the Dragon was a fucking machine of course, and Duo finally shut up - what had he even been saying? - submitting that one last inch, merely begging with his whimper and plucking at Wufei’s wrist on his throat to- to- 

As if in reward, or maybe just because the Dragon felt like it, the hand left his throat, went to the back of his neck and shoved him up hard against the rock again, cheek grinding into bitten granite and mica, and _yes yes yes that was it_ \- Duo canted his hips to just the right angle and oh _fuck_ at last - still nothing but groans and the occasional bitten off curse dropping from his mouth, all his attention centered on the cock ramming into him, right in that spot that made his spine turn into magma and his breath catch and burn in his lungs. Wufei hadn’t touched him, beyond the hard hands holding him down, and Duo didn’t touch his cock either, he was going to come like this, just like this, fucked and used and elated as his Dragon bit off the occasional noise he didn’t want to share but the muscles rippling into the hold told their own story and Duo was one massive incantation, primal magic priming and pulling and growing to the most primitive beat-

\---

Far above the chamber, Svale was fast asleep. Quatre and Trowa were talking quietly together, as Trowa did some work on his crossbow bolts. Howard was in his ship, swearing as he fixed some of the damage from the crash.

Heero stood near the place where Center had used him as a conduit. He often stopped there. It was right over the Source, though he couldn’t access it at this point in time. Not yet. Not strong enough. And he needed to beat Juusan first.

His senses reached out, along the lines of the earth, checking on the Guide, on the old Avatar, on-...

Heero stared out into the night. A faint crease wrinkled his brow, then smoothed out again.

That was promising. Some form of balance. Still precarious. Further observation required. But improvement nonetheless. Heero’s intervention with his Friend must have had an effect after all. Strange thought. To have had an effect on something on this earth indirectly, without destroying it.

He contemplated the thought for awhile, teasing at it for a bit, until he put it away for more serious considerations. This Friend he would be using against Juusan was close to being ready. So would Heero.

It’d taken him awhile, but he’d fully identified the parameters of the mission now.

Soon, it would all be over.

\---

Next Chapter: Decaying Orbits

How does Wufei see all this exactly? How many aspirins a day can you safely take before going beyond the recommended dosage?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All ye gods and little green apples was it hard to get the tone right on this. In fact you can blame this chapter for having killed SoaT 13 years ago, as this and a few other elements just seemed unwritable back then. But since then, I’ve written some Kakashi/Gai and some Sanji/Zoro. Some Lucci/Kaku. Some Darius/Ryou as well. I’m much better at getting two boneheaded macho fighter-type tough GUYS into the sack without any open soppiness or sentimentality.
> 
> Next chapter might be out in 2 weeks, or possibly 3 as there’s still a few sections left to write and my downtime is fast disappearing down the rabbit hole. I hope you enjoyed this installment in the meantime :


	43. Decaying Orbits

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Taking a step back in time to the evening after Wufei officially joined the crew, after the shield was cast. This chapter is a series of vignettes marching through time, up to the previous chapter’s events (skipped over, we just get Wu’s reaction later) and then heading off into the future.

_Date; 18/3/ E4420, 20:34:12 local time (2:20:24 CMT), Clipper ship Anstra._  
_Journal: Create_

_I am Chang Wufei, high Dragon and war leader of the Chang-Long clan. What follows is a journal of my battle preparations, and notes with as much information as I can gather about the entity known as The Scourge, Jusan. If I fail to destroy him, I hope this journal will help the next to make this attempt._

_If you are reading this and haven’t run away yet, if you are searching for information in order to defeat the creature, then I salute you. Whoever you are, know that I consider you to be a Dragon._

_I will put every scrap of information I can get from my sources here about the Scourge, this Jishin ‘sanctuary’ (Note: research further), and Center here, to assist in future endeavors in the advent of my failure._

_There are others here who are planning to oppose Jusan. I have formed an alliance of convenience with some magic users to deflect the arcane attacks from the Scourge. These people are unreliable and treacherous, in particular this Trickster who appears to be the last of his race. The creature has bound himself with the Oath of Blood and Stone (Note: research limitations etc.) which has given him a delay in his execution until after the Scourge is defeated. This arcane shield around the planet is from his people (Note: way of measuring strength? Any weaknesses the enemy could exploit?), so he and the others may prove themselves useful. I am hoping that our common goal will allow me to count on them until Jusan’s arrival._

_Though not optimal, it is possible that I may have to kill them all before the Scourge arrives to avoid a battle on multiple fronts._

_I am putting a counter on this Journal to indicate the arrival of the Scourge, as well as can be estimated at present._

_Date: 18/3/ E4420, 20:43:28 local, Clipper ship Anstra_  
_Journal: Off_

**Counter: 139 days (est) until arrival**

 

Laptop under his arm, Wufei crossed the small space of the cockpit and stepped into the armament area, to the workbench covered in a clean white surgical cloth and laid out with tools in sealed cubby holes. He docked the laptop securely; he did not fear an attack on the _Anstra_ in the immediate, but it didn’t even cross his mind to be lax in such an essential as ship security protocol. The _Anstra_ could be one hundred feet in the air in less than ten seconds, assuming its turrets hadn’t already shredded any attackers, and nothing within the cabin would move an inch.

Wufei scrubbed his face with a harsh gesture and then looked down at the workbench. Tomorrow, once he’d rested, he’d review and record what he’d learned today, about the Scourge, and that-...backstabbing vermin that’d used Wufei as his pawn. A Jishin. Jusan just had to have missed one. After being ever so systematic in eliminating everyone in Wufei's life.

Another man would have been furious, demented with pain and loss. Wufei reached for an electrometer and neatly fitted it into Shenlong’s UCR port, before booting up his laptop again.

 

\---

**Counter: 136 days (est) until arrival**

 

Wufei could feel himself under observation by the other inhabitants of the Sanctuary. He’d attacked them, tried to kill them, he made them nervous and he had no problem with that. He stayed out of the Sanctuary for the most part, bar those times he went to interrogate the Jishin or start to spar with a recovering Heero.

The third evening after his arrival found him sitting on a rock on the far outskirts of the Trickster structure, not far from the _Anstra_. The evening was pleasant, he’d taken the dead circuit he was repairing outside the cold steel walls of his spaceship in order to enjoy the breeze, ignoring the distant hollers of the hag and the Jishin arguing over something or other. He kept his head down, hoping the man coming his way would get the hint, but he did finally have to look up when the latter stopped a few feet away and waited.

One glance showed that here at least was somebody who was not nervous about approaching him per se, had perhaps only delayed so that he could arrange a way of doing so without being guaranteed an immediate ‘Fuck off and leave me alone.’

The tall man said nothing, did not ask any question which would have been given an immediate snarl of retort, he merely set down the _boccha_ board on the stone next to Wufei and sat down on the edge of the six foot long fallen obelisk Wufei had chosen. Then he waited, eyes on the game board.

The board was the real diplomat here. Wufei had played _boccha_ on master Li’s thousand year old set of ivory and bronze, he’d played against the gem-bedecked gold and platinum pieces of the former clan leader, the whole set worth a planet’s ransom. This board looked miserable by contrast, but value was not in the weight of metal alone. From the way the wood of the ten pieces shone satiny wet, the man - Trowa Barton - had whitled them himself, probably less than a day ago. The carvings were sparse, but delicate and sure, beautiful in their very simplicity. The two colors of wood, being fresh cut, were a little hard to tell apart, one a paler white-gold than the other, but Wufei could not help but note how well each matching piece paired up. The board was a thick plank of the same wood as one of the set of pieces, and the playing lines had been burned on with delicate touches, probably with a poker. The fighter who’d decimated Jusan’s goons was as skilled with his hands as he was with his crossbow.

The man had made a _boccha_ board. Probably just to play Wufei. And he was sitting there without any sign on his face that he was ever going to talk during their game. In addition, the board he’d carried like a platter was already set up in _quiestra_ position, giving Trowa a six point advantage before the first piece even moved. This clearly said, “I know the game, but I also did my homework. Someone has told me that Dragons spend their leisure time between planetary drops playing strategy games from an early age. I’m just going to assume I’m immediately outmatched, but I would still like to play. Nothing more.”

There was really no way such a gesture, however small and unasked for, could be met with a ‘fuck off and leave me alone’. Wufei could be uncivil and surly, but there was a line past which it would cross into the realms of dishonorable. He put down his circuit, turned more fully towards the board and gestured the other to start, giving him another inherent advantage.

Trowa did not say one word during the entire game. Wufei realized that here at least was one person he was probably going to manage to get along with.

A faint smile twisted Trowa’s lips beneath the fall of his bangs when he lost, but he still said nothing. He just sat there quietly, waiting. Wufei understood perfectly that if he picked up his circuit again, the man would leave and come back another day.

The circuit was entirely dead, fiddling with it was make-do work to keep his fingers and mind busy while his body and stamina finished recovering from the strain put on it by the Scourge’s psychic attack a few days ago. The sun was still an hour from setting, and the _Anstra_ was small, empty and cold.

Wufei reset the board into _quintura_ position. Trowa looked pleased without words that he’d been judged to only need an eight point advantage, and even more pleased when Wufei elected to start.

“You have skills, but they are rusty.”

“I have not played for over fifteen years,” Trowa admitted, Wufei’s words having given him leave to speak.

All the crap that could have been said at this point - wow, so you’re a Dragon, sorry about your race, I apologize for the Jishin, we hate him too, I hope you’ll still help against Jusan etc - remained unsaid, as Wufei had felt somewhat confident it would. The only words exchanged were a few pointers on the last moves of the game - Wufei won, but by a narrower margin this time - and then a polite good night.

In the distance, the Jishin was yelling full-out at the crone that he would be dead and mounted in a taxidermist shop before he obliged her morbid obsession. Wufei was getting a little curious to know what all the arguing was about, but he did not care enough to go closer to find out. He picked up his circuit and made his way to bed aboard his safely secured ship.

\---

**Counter: 135 days (est) until arrival**

_Date: 22/3/ E4420, 18:32:28 local, Clipper ship Anstra_  
_Journal On_

_I know the enemy fully now. I saw it destroy the Jishin with my own eyes, in an arcane recreation woven out of the memories of a witness._

_It’s name is Juusan._

_It will perish. For this I give my oath. My race will be the last it will ever murder._

_I hope the Jishin and I can find common ground now. Even if we can’t, our hate will keep us on target._

_Date: 22/3/ E4420, 18:34:08 local, Clipper ship Anstra_  
_Journal Off_

 

\---

**Counter: 129 days (est) until arrival**

 

Wufei had been seventeen, and had just entered into Juusan’s services when the latter eliminated the despicable Tricksters-

The thought seemed to freeze like crystal in Wufei’s thoughts. A memory, once simple, had picked up many new facets.

He remembered the celebrations amongst the clans, the laughter and the drinking -

_Duo Maxwell staring at the memories of his dead friends and family -_

The hated Jishin, that race of twisted, vile degenerates -

_Maxwell , taut as a standard, staring at Juusan with a smile of pure, clean hatred -_

-had been defeated by the Dragons' ally, the Scourge -

_A memory of the ruins of Jiachan after Juusan had decimated all the men and women who had once laughed and celebrated his victories._

-it was cause for revel!

Seventeen… he’d been a mature seventeen, which was why his clan had accepted Jusan’s offer a year later to take Wufei under his wing, where he’d learned much.

Fifteen...Duo had been fifteen when his race had been brutally slaughtered, and then taken up residence in his soul, placing the burden of their revenge on his young shoulders. No wonder he was half insane.

Wufei was sitting on the extended ramp of the _Anstra_ , waiting for an analysis of Shenlong’s energy charges to finish running behind him. Thirty yards away, in one of the bowl-like depressions around the Sanctuary, the Jishin was doing something or other. Wufei was trying to pay attention to the laptop’s readout, not to the distant figure or the equally distant memories of another life.

Duo had been teleporting across the field, hitting the ground, pummeling the air with black shards of light, but now he’d stopped. He was glaring at the glimmering oil-slick shield in the sky, probably damning its interference with his own magic, even as he’d fought to have it placed to defeat Juusan. Expression thoughtful, he turned, walked in that quick, graceful stride that looked like a dagger dancing on a hair, towards the lip of the practice area. Like swift death on two feet.

The blue eyes twitched as he felt Wufei’s eyes on him. The cheerful - somewhat irritating - grin reappeared.

It wasn’t a mask. That was really Duo. The jovial killer. And the skilful manipulator, that was also him. And the ruthless avenger. And five billion other things, but Wufei suspected Maxwell didn’t need the multiple schizophrenia his race had induced in him to be a complex and confusing person. He would probably manage that all by himself.

...Stupid Jishin. How could they function like that? From his knowledge of their race, Duo was not an exception. The Tricksters, the chaotic people of the Twilight. The personification of magic, in all its complexity and elegant ruthlessness.

Wufei despised that fuzziness. He himself was all one purpose, and was proud of being simple and straightforward, as focused as a laser beam. His honor as a warrior and justice for his dead were the twin poles of his life and everything he did was concentrated on that.

“Wassup, Wufei? You admiring my skills? Want some pointers?”

He contemplated Duo in silence with the slight contempt such a suggestion deserved, then he brought his attention to his laptop again, and did not look up any more until night had fallen, the analysis had completed and the Jishin was long gone.

\---

**Counter: 125 days (est) until arrival**

 

Dragons were naturally used to working within the confines of a clan. The Jishin made it impossible to work with him, but Heero and Trowa had proven to be men Wufei could see himself cooperating with. The man Fen could also be counted on to fight the Scourge it seemed, though he refused to spar. He was such an unquantifiable element, and occasionally insane, he was much on par with the Jishin, however good he was at using his antique Scale. Wufei was not sure he wanted the man at his side, something about him rubbed him the wrong way.

Heero now… he was a rock, a bulwark. Wufei broke against him in training day after day, and was left with that burning question - who the hell are you?! - caught behind his teeth every time. He’d eventually realized, with a hint from Trowa, that Heero never answered a question, rarely talked and almost never made sense when he did. Wufei still questioned him at times, as he did not feel like tiptoeing around such a ridiculous limitation, whether cultural, personal or mental. Heero merely ignored him.

This didn’t stop Wufei from considering him an ally. They talked with their bodies, with their fists, with strike and counterstrike. It’d do.

Physically Wufei did not think Trowa would be anywhere near a match, but he was valuable in many other ways. The shaman was a pool of quiet playing _boccha_ , _chemen_ and twelve-stones in the evening. A buffer between Wufei and the Jishin when required, and between Svale and everybody else. And above all, a man with connections. Over the two weeks Wufei had known him, Trowa had roped in magic users, some technologists, and these ‘Wardens’ to help, and Wufei saw how each one was being fitted into a useful strategy to deal with the forces around the Scourge, in much the same way Trowa fitted pieces on the _boccha_ board, once more in _quiestra_ position now that his skills were improving. He did the same for Howard and the Sweepers that the Jishin had brought, quickly taking over from the temperamental and untrustworthy Trickster in becoming the go-to man people relied on.

Then there was one more man in their group Wufei had yet to really interact with. But here he was, walking alongside Trowa, the twelve-stone board in his hands this evening.

“My name is Quatre Raberba Winner,” he said with a small smile and searching eyes as he sat down. “We were never properly introduced.”

“Chang Wufei of the Chang-Long clan,” Wufei responded out of obligation, hoping that the evening was not going to be tedious.

“Can we play? Trowa tells me you’re amazing. I know the rules, but I’ve not played much,” he added. He had blond hair and a pleasing smile. And dimples. But his eyes were odd. Wufei couldn’t quite put a finger on it. But he’d noticed the way the others watched Winner, as if the man was somehow dangerous. Winner had only talked to Wufei once before so far, when he’d invited him to join their group. That time he’d said, ‘I thought you said Justice was more important than your personal satisfaction’. He’d stopped Wufei dead in his tracks when he’d been about to slaughter the Jishin. With nothing more than a hard look and a few well chosen words.

Wufei nodded. “Let’s play.”

Winner barely knew the game and predictably lost, but he did much better on the second round than the first. Twelve-stones had simple rules, it was the typical easy-to-learn-hard-to-master game. Winner listened with interest to Wufei’s quick explanations of some of his mistakes, asked some intelligent questions, thanked him and left.

Winner was Trowa Barton’s lover, had been for quite a few years as Wufei understood from a few overheard remarks in the Sanctuary around mealtimes. After this evening, Wufei was not surprised the quiet man got along with the charming one after all.

\---

 

Shenlong’s display lined up a scintillating string of numbers. Wufei forced himself to focus on them.

Heero’s fist hammered out like the arm of a crusher-bot, relentless and unstoppable. Wufei’s fingers tightened on the bottle of water he’d been sipping from. He could take that kind of blow, but could the Jishin it was aimed at manage it without getting his foolish ribcage crushed in? They called it _glass_ armor, not plasteel after all-

The point proved moot as Duo simply wasn’t there when the blow landed, he’d faded away like one of his ghosts.

Shenlong ran the numbers again for Wufei, and this time put them through a Sai-Meiyong equation to boot. Like a faithful dog who’d not gotten the attention it required with just an intent stare, so had taken to sitting down obediently as well. Wufei glanced over the numbers and dismissed them peremptorily. Then he caught himself, turned away from the bout behind him, called up the numbers again and ran his own counter analysis. The results were good. The repairs performed by the Scourge were holding up adequately, as much as Wufei hated to admit it.

A solid thud rang out behind him.

Wufei forced himself to turn around at a regular pace rather than spin.

Duo was dancing away. Either he had hit Heero, or else Yuy had been the one to deal that loud blow and thus prove that the spirit armor really could absorb a lot of kinetic energy.

A few garbled words fell off Duo’s tongue, harsh and dissonant, stinking of power, like distant echoes of thunder. He was grinning. He didn’t look like he was expecting a response to whatever he’d said. Maybe he hadn’t spoken at all, might have been his ghosts.

A program running on the _Anstra_ signalled to Wufei that it was done. He was looking into the possibility of restoring or recreating an older type of energy weapon to replace his lost lance. That was important. It was also important to see how these two men fought, though. He would rely on both to attack the Scourge at his side, however abhorrent the notion was in respects to the Trickster.

Heero leaped like a massive big cat and almost pinned Duo, but the Jishin bobbed away, sending dark waves of energy to hit Heero’s lower back. They bounced harmlessly off Wing’s shield. Heero spun around, quick and lethal, and Duo fell into a graceful spring of tension, waiting for him, ragged grin on his face and eyes dancing.

It’d be better to watch this in person, Wufei told himself. It would, his inner self, which never gave him a break, immediately added; but the truth of the matter - whether you like admitting it or not - is that whatever their provenance or morals, these are two extremely good looking men fighting at a height of power few others can reach, and you’ve been alone for over a year and celibate for longer.

Wufei did not try to hide from the thought; he let it lay a white-hot whiplash of irritation and shame across his back, and then he turned away. The _Anstra_ was nearby, he’d set up its cameras and analyzers to record the sparring, and review it in lattice and vector format later on, images stripped out. It was all he needed in the end.

A large _whoosh_ and a stink of ozone and baked granite followed him for a few paces. Wufei battled his curiosity and kept on course towards his ship.

 

\---

**Counter: 123 days (est) until arrival**

_Date: 3/5/ E4420, 13:41:09 local, Clipper Ship Anstra_  
_Search Engine: On_

_Search: Jishin_

_Search: real Jishin_

_Search: Jishin scientific facts_

_Date: 3/5/ E4420, 13:49:12 local, Clipper Ship Anstra_  
_Search Engine: Off._

\---

**Counter: 104 days (est) until arrival**

_Date: 22/5/ E4420, 8:19:52 local, Clipper Ship Anstra_  
_Onboard Computer Connection:On_

 _Flight Plan - Destination: 81.747054, -64.957040_  
_Estimated Flight Time: 132 minutes local_

\---

 _Date: 22/5/ E4420, 15:05:06 local, Clipper Ship Anstra_  
_Search Engine: On_

_Search: Center, Sources_

_Search: Center, Mythology, Trials_

_Search: Center, Mythology, Three Dooms of Crag K?C*_

_Date: 22/5/ E4420, 15:23:57 local, Clipper Ship Anstra_  
_Search Engine: Off_

 _Date: 22/5/ E4420, 15:24:08 local, Clipper Ship Anstra_  
_Journal: On_

_This planet is RIDICULOUS. If I am not assured by my allies that its destruction would have consequences on the etheric plane, I would be behind the Jishin’s plan of evacuating the place, blowing it up and taking Juusan with it._

_Date: 22/5/ E4420, 15:26:29 local, Clipper Ship Anstra_  
_Journal: Off_

\---

**Counter: 102 days (est) until arrival**

_Date: 24/5/ E4420, 13:03:48 local, Clipper Ship Anstra_  
_Analysis unit: ON_  
_INPUT: Epyon (signature)_  
_Track_  
_On contact: TREAT AS HOSTILE_

The program prompted Wufei for parameters of the reaction to this new ‘hostile’. Wufei pondered. The turrets of the _Anstra_ would be a good welcoming committee. But he did not want that word-breaker, Fen, to destroy the spaceship; they might need it in the fight. Wufei keyed the analysis unit to warn him if it picked up the Phoenix’s armor or energy signature anywhere in the vicinity. If Fen showed up again, Wufei would deal with the vermin himself. Terminally. Then shoot the body into the sun - let him come back from that - after stripping the undeserving cur of the old Scale he dishonored.

\---

 

**Counter: 97 days (est) until arrival**

 

 _Date: 29/5/ E4420, 3:05:12 CMT, Spinnet Ship “Howard’s Pride and Joy” (sp?)_  
_Journal On._

_We have obtained the third element to complete and stabilize the shield spell of the Sanctuary (see Sanctuary Plan, Amended). It is, oddly enough, technological. A capacitor of intricate and quite fascinating design, according to my first readings. It is now being further analysed. Will attach full schematics to this journal when obtained._

_Information obtained aboard Cabalist battleship indicate that I may not survive the encounter with the Scourge, but that we may win this fight. The source of this information is arcane and thus probably unreliable, though indications that it is akin to this ‘zero system’ the Jishin have come up with might give it some credence. If this is the case, this journal becomes my eulogy over the pyre of my enemy._

_This would be acceptable._

_Analysis 2 is finished, checking results, will record here._

_Date: 29/5/ E4420, 3:15:39 CMT, Spinnet Ship “Howard’s Pride and Joy”_  
_Journal Off_

 _Date: 29/5/ E4420, 3:15:44 CMT, Spinnet Ship “Howard’s Pride and Joy”_  
_Interface Reader-plugin Open._

\---  
**Counter: 97 days (est) until arrival**

 

 _Date: 29/5/E4420, 23:37:22 local, Clipper Ship Anstra_  
_Journal:On_

 _Date: 29/5/E4420, 23:43:03 local, Clipper Ship Anstra_  
_Journal:Off_

 

Wufei had stopped staring at the blinking cursor of the terminal, and gone to take a shower. He was now staring at the water trickling down the plasteel wall.

His thoughts, oddly calm and subdued, tried to escape the orbit of a large piece that seemed to be missing out of his center, his conscience, his self.

Everything in his culture, his beliefs, were insisting that what he’d just done was wrong. Very wrong. Having sex with someone with no moral standards - a _Jishin_ of all creatures - was already cause for harsh reproof, but the violence-...

Dragon societal mores were rigid and codified, they had to be to manage highly trained and deadly warriors living in close ship quarters for months or years on end between titanic battles. Of course his culture was as quasi-dead as the Jishin’s, but that did not signify. It lived on within Wufei, and the codex of his people was clear. A Dragon mated only with strength. It was considered a shame to fall for weakness. And it was an outrage and a sign of mental disease to need to hurt and overpower that weakness. Planets taken over by dragons did not have to fear rape, and even the pillage was an orderly matter of well tabulated ransom. Since the Dragons killed any who resisted, or else kidnapped them if promising enough in order to reinforce their ranks, the conquered rarely considered themselves all that fortunate, but it was nonetheless true that they could have had it a whole lot worse.

What had happened earlier… he was trying to situate it on the rigid moral ruler he’d never had a problem using all his life. It had felt-... it had felt as if it _should_ feel very wrong. But…

Wufei lifted his head, eyes closed as the water streamed down over his face, letting his thoughts drift for a few seconds. Nice to be planetside and have plenty of water at hand. The warmth of the needle-jet flow eased the scratches and a few strained muscles he’d picked up in the past hour. The second time they'd fucked, Duo had done more damage than all the Cabalists aboard the battleship.

Threads started to pry loose from the tangle beneath his mental fingers. He had to discard certain aspects of what had happened, as not directly concerning him. The Jishin had courted the violence, demanded it. The man had demons, he’d wanted to exorcise them, that was his issue (of which he had many). The problem was, Wufei had accepted. The man was as unstable as U-238, Wufei should have stayed well away-

Then Wufei finally put his finger on the crucial distinction that unraveled a lot of the situation.

Unstable did not mean weak. Not in the Jishin’s case.

Wufei didn’t feel shame - a bit of an ick factor, remembering who and what the Jishin were, and what lurked in Maxwell’s head, but no more. And he did not feel sick. Because however much he might dislike the man, there was no question about Duo’s strength. And the violence... was just a way of proving that.

_Bruises reddening on pale skin, a still panting form beneath him. A moment of concern - but not that much because he knows the measure of this man, he’s hit him harder than that during practice -_

_And Duo sinuously curls up and there is not the slightest shadow on his face, his expression of dark delight as naked as his body. Black slicks drift over his skin like a cloud over sunshine and there are no more bruises, no more drips of semen marking him. The darkness in his smile rears up as he hoists himself on his elbows, “That was awesome, let’s do_ that _again.”_

He would, too. Because Maxwell was right, they needed a way of dealing with each other, even hurting each other that did not end in maiming, and this would certainly do.

Wufei let his harsh intellect and sense of right and wrong rip the last two hours to shreds, looking for anything truly reprehensible. It failed. Oh, it was an avowed fact that this… liaison was not very reasonable, or rational, or safe, or sane. But neither were their circumstances. Part of their anger towards each other was because they were both the last scions of their respective races and they hated that they had to find in each other the close-knit bonds of kinship that should have been all around them. Their situations, sunk into the ragged cutting depths of despair as they were, mirrored each other. Maybe if they’d been different people, they could have found comfort in sharing that. But they were who they were and so they would rampage against each other, in battle or in bed, daring the other to show the pain and pity they would revile in themselves.

It wasn’t pretty, but it had some strange sort of stability to it. Let it be.

 

\---

**Counter: 58 days (est) until arrival**

_Date: 6/7/E4420, 20:18:37 local, Clipper Ship Anstra_  
_Journal: On_

_Sweeper outpost 41 was attacked at around 5:52 local by Scourge forces making an advanced foray against our defenses. Other than mercenary trash, the battalion was composed of remains of the clans Jian-Liu and Markeb._

_The advanced Sweeper network was efficient in slowing them down until assistance could arrive. I boarded the main ship, a Mark XI Hu-Die class, to neutralize the opposition and discuss the matter of allegiances._

_Result: 5 casualties. 36 Dragons (rank 2 to 5) have accepted to ally with us and have reinforced key Sweeper positions in orbit (Calendar: Review deployment in two days with Trowa and Howard.)_

_Date: 6/7/E4420, 20:26:03 local, Clipper Ship Anstra_  
_Journal: Off_

\---

**Counter: 56 days (est) until arrival**

 

It’d become a routine in the past two months. Twice a week Wufei would play against Trowa and usually beat him, a restful, quiet evening. On a couple of other nights of the week, he’d get himself trounced at twelve-stones by Quatre.

Wufei hadn’t played at master level since leaving Master Li. It was not a restful, quiet evening, but he felt it sharpening his skills, and not just at the game.

Even if it had not helped him in any way, he would still play, and talk to Quatre. Because Wufei had gone from somewhat dismissing the healer, to realizing this man was going to be one of the key strategists in his fight against the Scourge.

That evening as he reset the board, he asked Quatre if the latter wasn’t getting bored, playing a game he now mastered at a level far beyond Wufei - beyond anyone human, probably.

“You’re not that bad,” Quatre had said with his charming dimples and lovely smile and odd eyes that seemed to be looking two inches _into_ Wufei’s head.

They’d established early on that Wufei did not need his ego coddled.

“What do you get out of it?” Wufei asked curiously.

Quatre stared at the board - or two inches _into_ the board, possibly.

When he spoke, it was in that very odd cadence that Wufei felt somewhat uncomfortable with, for reasons he could not quite explain.

“You have streaks of extreme brilliance when truly pressed. I am measuring them. It is also a good test of ever-evolving strategizing. I am measuring myself.”

Wufei had by now heard about Zero, of course. A lot of the information had come from the Jishin, whose overconfidence in his race’s magical abilities made him not the most reliable of sources. Trowa’s mouth had pinched when asked and Wufei had not pressed. Until a month ago, Quatre himself had not been very forthcoming about his unintended ‘passenger’. But since they’d picked up the third keystone, something in his attitude had done a one eighty on the subject; he and Trowa seemed willing to be more open about it. Which was good, because Wufei was going to have to trust this Zero and Quatre with strategies against Juusan.

From how the healer described it, Zero sounded like a powerful weapon. Most powerful weapons were very dangerous. That was a fact Dragons accepted virtually from the cradle.

“Is there a way I can assist?” Wufei asked.

Quatre gave him one of those odd looks - calculating and also honestly pleased at the same time. After hanging around the Jishin for any length of time, however, having only two personalities to deal with was almost banal, so Wufei didn’t find it offputting. From what he understood of Zero’s operations, that kind of cold weighing of every word, every action, was part of the process.

“I’ve heard that twelve-stone can be played at high speed,” Quatre said, scooping up the stones that’d gone through Wufei’s defenses like they were made of cobwebs. “It changes the game from a long-term strategy objective to a more reactive and intuitive one. Though I understand purists consider it a puerile way of playing…?”

“Three seconds a turn,” Wufei said, moving his own stones back to their starting place on the board. “To start with.”

 

\---

**Counter: 53 days (est) until arrival**

 

Duo swung a fist and it shone like a meteor, magic powering the punch until it could shatter steel. Heero threw up his crossed forearms-

Mistake, Wufei thought calmly. Body language was a subtle thing, truly, he could not say exactly what minute shift in Duo’s weight had given it away, but he was not surprised when Duo followed the punch smoothly into a lunge, used the rebound of magic off of Wing’s shields to give him momentum upwards, vaulting over his opponent. His other gloved hand flashed down with a dagger of dark energy towards Heero’s spine.

Heero hadn’t read the body language… but he managed to dodge. His speed was beyond compare. Beyond human, really. Or had he seen it coming after all? Why hadn’t he reacted better than avoid the blow?

Wufei dumped a program into Shenlong’s communicator and shoved it out to Wing. He could have simply given his advice out loud, but he was training Heero to look at the head’s-up display. A rare scowl of displeasure crossed Heero’s face as light flickered in his left eye, but he still focused on the parry and retaliation Wufei was suggesting he could have used.

“This. Here. That’s the automated deflection waiting for you to give it preferred parameters of response. It’s keyed to your visual cortex. If you’d seen the blow coming, Wing could have provided a downward deflection to the power surge,” Wufei lectured, as the image they shared each in their own HUD jumped about and ran through different attacks and vectors. “You are not a primitive warrior wearing a hunk of steel plate, Yuy, use Wing to its full.” True Scale was worth an entire platoon of soldiers all by itself, it was specialist, radio operator, medic, grunt and non-com officer all rolled into one, going about well-rehearsed tasks, controlling the battlefield and setting up defenses; the Dragon inside all of that was the commander, the strategist, giving the order that would direct that might to where it would be most effective.

“I did see it coming,” was all Heero said after ten seconds.

So that answered that question - which Wufei hadn’t actually asked, as shouting ‘Didn’t you figure out what he was doing?!’ would not have gotten an actual response. Tangential remarks and blunt statements worked much better, especially when it called out a possible flaw in Heero’s technique.

“I feel sorry for you poor goons.” Duo sauntered over, wide grin like a victory banner. Dark light danced in his palm where the glove left the skin bare. His armor writhed like a cat arching its back and stretching. “So much easier if it’s just a part of you, right? Instead of bolting on a piece of metal, applying a spot of welding and hoping to catch up to what any Jishin toddler could do.”

“Technology can be ever improved over the generations,” Wufei shot back pretty much on automatic, most of his concentration was on pushing more information out to Wing’s HUD. “Soul-bound magic in particular is inherently tied and limited to the mind and abilities of its user, however deranged they might be.”

“Huh-uh, is that Dragon-ese for, ‘Oh please, Duo, now it’s my turn, please beat me up’?”

“No, I want Yuy to master this. Attack him again,” Wufei ordered.

“Don’t be scared, Wufee, I promise I’ll be gentle,” Duo purred (Wufei noted in passing the flush of adrenaline on his cheeks).

“Later. In the immediate: Jishin, the rear might be your race’s favorite target, but remember that any fighter worth his salt will have that area protected. As does Heero. Now I know it goes counter to every single backbiting fiber of your body, but next time, aim for the goddamn knee joint if you want to at least pretend to be effective in a fight.”

“Duly noted,” Duo said, eyes raking up and down Wufei’s legs.

“Dream on, that’s as close as you’ll get,” Wufei sneered; in another leap in his communication ability he would not have thought himself capable of, he had become awfully good at phrasing his suggestion in as offensive, scathing a manner possible, since passing them off as insults was the only way they could be accepted by the Trickster.

… A few months ago, another man who’d worn his skin might have been irritated, if not downright concerned, with his newfound ability to communicate with these alien elements. That man hadn’t seen the counter on the _Anstra_ ’s journal slip below the three digit mark, he hadn’t seen his death in a mirror, he hadn’t found allies who might actually help him win this desperate confrontation looming on the horizon and who’d stand and die by his side whatever the odds. Today’s Wufei didn’t even think about such matters much anymore. Extraneous worries were shed like ionized particles off Shenlong’s shields at the end of a day of excruciating training.

Despite _knowing_ that Duo was going to go for the knees (because Duo did listen, he knew who the better fighter and tactician was), Heero still got caught a little short and staggered. His deflection had been better, but not stellar, he was still handling Wing like something to be used rather than worked with. Whenever Wufei got a little frustrated, he reminded himself that Heero hadn’t even heard of a Dragon’s Scale half a year ago, and was now mastering it at a level only a dozen other Dragons had reached. Fighting against magic with a mecha was tricky, but Heero knew better than any of them it was essential. He’d get there. Wufei just hoped he’d get there before they were all dead.

Duo landed on Heero, caught him in some complicated magic trap that pinned him to the rock of their training grounds (Wufei mentally acknowledged the strike, while his sniffed “Pff, showy,” counted as a ringing endorsement.)

“Gotcha,” Duo murmured, grinning in Heero’s face. The death glare he got in return failed to fry his eyebrows, surprisingly.

Wufei, already calling up an improvement to the deflection program, let his eyes dwell on the tangled figures. Appreciating the tableau for a few seconds on an aesthetical plane rather than on the earthy one that a nearby drooling Svale was undoubtedly enjoying. Now that he was savagely fucking one of the participants on a near nightly basis, his focus on that level had become as absolute as the rest.

\---

**Counter: 51 days (est) until arrival**

 

 _Date: 13/7/E4420, 18:39:12 local, Clipper Ship Anstra_  
_Search Engine: On_  
_Link to: Clan Archives (authorisation code CLW3821, verified by psychic fingerprinting)_  
_Search: Training regimen against magic_  
_Restrict on Scale Class 10 and 10+_

\---

**Counter: 59 days (est) until arrival (note, corrected by ten days, delay due to issues with the Libra’s FTL manifold reported by a source aboard that the Sweeper Howard has access to)**

 

\---

Some days, it seemed like the counter was the only thing changing in an unending loop.

Get up, eat rations, practice. Eat lunch, rest, watch the others practice, advise and assist. Practice some more. Return to the _Anstra_ , shower off the sweat and dust of the sparring field, treat the occasional bruise and wrenched muscle with a regenerator - Heero was improving, he could slip past Wufei’s guard regularly now and he’d never quite figured out how to completely pull a punch.

Wufei would walk back to the Sanctuary to eat whatever Svale had cooked up, talk with the others, go over plans for the Sweepers, send the Dragons who had joined him out on patrols. Play a game with Trowa or Quatre, or talk with Master O, one of the Wardens who had worked with Dragons before.

The assembly would break up as the sun went down. Everyone needed their rest. And at this stage, communication between them did not take long, did not need many words or affectations or diplomacy. It was not required among warriors.

Evening would fall over the Sanctuary, cooling air taking on that velvety quiet quality muffled by the dying rays of the sun and the whippoorwill calls. Wufei would return to the _Anstra_ , finish a few matters, start up a strategy or analyzer program, something to help direct his steps the next day. Then he’d do research. Or, if he had nothing pressing, or if he felt that itch in his mind that needed tiring out while his body recovered… he’d walk to the underground chamber where the capacitor floated over the hearthstone and hummed faintly. In the past month the rock had magically sprouted a set of doors, and extra wards. They would let him through though.

Occasionally the chamber remained empty and Wufei would make his way back to the _Anstra_ and get an early night of sleep. But most times, within minutes of his arrival, Duo would appear.

Duo had declared to one and all that he was bedding down in the chamber to keep an eye on the Sanctuary lines and the effect of the capacitor acting as a keystone. Wufei knew damn well it was a lie and that if Wufei was not there, Duo would not be here either, and would most likely be at the fresh springs hide-out in the mountains which Wufei was perhaps the only one to know the location of. Why Duo pretended to sleep here, and went to hide instead, was something Wufei could not fathom. Reasonable precaution? Dislike of doing the sane and expected? Sheer paranoia? He felt no need to speculate. The pretense, whether canny misdirection or not, had the advantage of explaining why Duo had supplied the chamber with a bed and some odds and ends of furniture, procured from who-knew-where. Why Duo had thought furniture was required when they’d initially fucked just fine without it was another mystery, but Wufei estimated it the one rational decision the creature had ever made. They spent all day every day sparring and hurting and pushing their bodies to the limits. Chasing discomfort and possible injury after hours was foolish.

Since Duo pretended to sleep in the chamber, he could come and go as he pleased; it was up to Wufei to stay beneath Svale’s radar on his way over to join the Jishin. He’d found a couple of ways of making his way to the chamber without being seen from her hovel. He’d expected her to find out anyway and not hear the end of it, and he’d already prepared his most cutting ‘I really don’t care what you think’ look to lash her with, yet the hag never said anything about it. She no longer teased the two young men about any sexual tension between them, he’d noted, so she probably did know… could he believe she knew the art of discretion (or perhaps the better part of valor)? Or maybe she didn’t care as much as she pretended as long as they kept their infighting to the occasional verbal back-and-forth. Wufei suspected most of the other Sanctuary inhabitants knew and did not care, the exception to both feelings being the stone creature that clung to Duo, and who was usually sent away to sleep at the hidden springs when night was about to fall, buzzing off in a puzzled sort of way after making one last grotesque expression at Wufei.

He and Duo didn’t speculate about what their allies knew. They didn’t talk about what they were doing anymore, per se. A few verbal insults were exchanged like a formality on occasion, or just harsh silence ripped apart by the noises Duo made, hybrid of pain and ecstasy and the creaks of the bed.

A compromise without name, without words had evolved. Wufei would hold Duo down, and certainly took him hard, but he did not bruise and he did not play any further into Duo’s fantasies. The latter seemed to have abated (not that they discussed this of course.) In short, their couplings were efficient and hard rather than brutal and vicious. Duo didn’t complain, and Wufei certainly wasn’t about to.

Juusan’s arrival, his sheer presence growing nearer and nearer, was like a weight grinding them down, scouring out their weaknesses, the useless parts of themselves until they were all as hard as diamonds. It seemed perfectly normal now that he and the Jishin could function together, yet still despise each other, hate each other for being the warped mirror of what they’d lost. That stayed on one of the facets of their relationship; on another was this thing they did at night, and on yet another the increasing coordination of all their fighting styles, and even, yes, trust and reliance, the way one relied on a well-tested and maintained weapon.

“S’there any of those apples left?” came a sleepy murmur behind Wufei.

Wufei tightened his belt and glanced around at where a rickety wooden table held a few odds and ends. He grabbed the last fruit from the bowl and tossed it over his shoulder. If it hit the Jishin in the head, that wasn’t really going to be a problem for him.

“Thanks.” The word was followed by a crunch.

“We need to work on that combined attack tomorrow,” Wufei said, slipping on his tunic. “Early. Don’t make me come and drag you out of your lair.”

“Oh, no problem, I’ma gonna get me a good night’s sleep now,” Duo said with a lazy, tired smirk instead of the fifty other biting or mocking or insultingly innuendo-laden responses he would have given before they started fucking (it really couldn’t be termed anything else.)

Wufei gave a grunt and headed out in the night to his clipper. The faint displacement of air behind him signaled that Duo had teleported away, apple and all.

 

\---

**Counter: 44 days (est) until arrival**

_Date: 30/7/E4420, 6:39:12 local, Clipper Ship Anstra_  
_Journal On:_  
_We are-_

_//PERIMETER ALERT! PERIMETER ALERT!//_

Wufei was out of his chair and out the door the next instant, Shenlong revving up its energy shield.

As he leaped down the ramp, the first explosion punched the air and a flare of flame at three o’clock, near the outskirts of the Sanctuary, caught his attention.

 

\---

 

Next chapter: When Space Ninjas Attack

That's been the placeholder name for this next chapter for months now, and I'm damned if I can think of a better one now that I'm under the gun. I mean. It's space ninjas. Attacking. It does exactly what it says on the tin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the second chapter that killed SoaT back in the days; it was meant to be two or three chapters, and no, couldn’t do it. I hadn’t written a single word of it and I could not figure out how to move this forward at all. Since then, I have had experience with writing ‘vignette’ chapters, so I went with that and made my life hella easier. I’m still not 100% happy with all sections, but it hopefully gets the job done and has some nice interactions, and now we get to move on to more fun things, like ‘xplosions. Can’t go wrong with ‘xplosions.
> 
> Next chapter out in probably 3 weeks, maybe more (yes, I know I left it on a cliffhanger, bad Mal, bad.) It’s 80% written and it’ll be way easier to finish than this chapter, in fact I’m raring to finish it, I love writing fight scenes and violence and space ninjas, however I am about to tip off the edge of the planet and fall 10,000 km along with my family and my dogs, and this will take up most of my time as you can imagine. I’ll post an update on Dreamwidth https://maldoror-chant.dreamwidth.org/ once I have internet access and a few other essentials, like a computer and a chair and such, and if further delays may incur.


	44. When Space Ninjas Attack

There was agitated chatter on the comms, but none of the five Dragons posted as guards in the Sanctuary seemed to know more about the explosion that’d rocked the place than Wufei did. Wufei called up the location of Wing on his scale’s on board computer. The direction Shenlong indicated in the HUD was the same direction the explosion had come from, as well as the faint wisp of smoke dispersing on the early morning breeze, to Wufei’s lack of surprise. Wufei ran that way, eyes and sensors scanning the Sanctuary’s many, many cirques, nooks, crannies and cover. The Jishin could be admitted to being good at magic, but a three year old Dragon could build a more defensible base out of a cushion fort.

Heero was standing in the middle of one of the areas full of menhirs and odd stones. Stock still, he looked completely passive, a stopped clockwork soldier whose spring had run down, as if he could not possibly have anything to do with the smoking crater twenty feet away. 

“Yuy, who is-“

Shenlong’s sensors all remained quiescent, but Wufei picked up the barest flicker of motion aimed at Heero’s back. His fang flashed towards that movement - barely more than a heatwave flicker in the still air - but it was already intersecting Heero’s space. 

Heero grunted as he was hurled forward by a blow from the invisible enemy. Wing’s shields sparked and flared, yet a red line of blood drew itself on Heero’s upper back. The attacker was using some form of energy blade and knew enough about high level armour to know at which angle, speed and location to cut to get through it, as long as he had the element of surprise. For most High Dragon armour, that is. Heero might have been stabbed in the lung were he wearing any other scale, but Wing had specifications that had been a closely guarded military secret on Jiachan, and these attackers would not know them. They could, however, adjust.

Heero did not stagger more than one step despite the vicious attack, he did not reach for the injury, seemed to have not noticed it at all. His feet plowed hard into the sod to stop and then he threw himself backwards right at the location where the strike had come from, so fast and fearlessly that the attacker did not have time to capitalize on the move. Wing’s shields screamed and burned as they rammed into the flickering figure. There was a hiss and crackle of static, and the camouflage shield the intruder was wearing flickered and died. A man, larger than Heero, sleek build, black clothes covered in light-weight reinforcements, a dark mask hiding all features - that lot, great. Wufei told Shenlong to hook into the Anstra, use its analyzers, sweep the field for EM signatures and any other disturbance on varying frequencies, and feed the results to all Dragons once it got a hit. 

He was about to take care of the intruder in front of him, but there was no need. Heero did not seem surprised at the attacker suddenly appearing before his eyes, he did not even pause, he turned and grabbed the man by the forearm while his fist swung back and then punched, hard and deadly. Wufei had been on the receiving end of that punch, both in practice and in a real fight. He was not surprised that the intruder’s reinforced outfit, which was designed to absorb the kinetic energy of a bullet, was insufficient to diffuse that blow. The attacker lost all his breath in a broken gargle of ribs meeting lungs as he folded over Heero’s fist. Heero did not pause, he hammered the attacker again, this time punching the man on the chin hard enough to send the whole body flying, or it would have if that vice-like grip on the forearm had released him. The man sagged in the hold like a rag doll. 

“Good, but there’s undoubtedly more-“ Wufei started to say, but Heero wasn’t done. He spun on himself a few times at increasing velocity, still holding the intruder by the forearm, and then hurled the dying attacker straight up into the air like a hammer throw. 

Wufei stared in blank incomprehension at the move.

 _Ba-aam!_ At thirty feet, the body exploded, sending a shockwave rolling over the Sanctuary.

Great, the intruders were rigged with explosives. Tied to their heartbeat, perhaps. The first one had caught Heero by surprise, though fortunately the attacker had been sent flying back with a punch, one presumed, and had died at the corner of the cirque. Wufei scowled at the crater, then glanced at the sky. The oil-slick shimmer of the planetary shield was still there, so the Sanctuary hadn’t been damaged beyond repair yet, despite one menhir over there showing a definite dent. Wufei did not understand the workings of the Sanctuary, how intrinsic to its function every piece was. For a huge area made mostly of fortified and warded stone, it suddenly felt oddly fragile.

He’d already sent the information about the trapped attackers to the Dragons patrolling the area. As another explosion shook the morning air, he hoped they’d gotten the message. 

A flicker.

Wufei reacted instantly. The energy wings shot him off in the direction only that brief and barely-there disturbance and his instincts indicated. He felt/heard the thrum of an energy blade sweep near his neck - Wufei spun around and blasted what looked like empty air with a full force punch of energy from his fang. He shaped the blast to pick up and hurl upwards, and followed along with a sweep of energy wings, taking the battle in the air. A flicker a bit to his right, like a ripple. One deadly kick in that direction broke the camo shield, a punch to the jaw disabled retaliation. One more blast from the fang, shaped like a spear this time, pierced the man’s heart. Wufei shot back towards the ground, shields up, and landed with a loud crash, creating his own small crater as the force of the blast punched him down. He stood up fluidly, scanning the area.

Heero hadn’t even looked his way, as if having no doubt Wufei would dispatch the enemy. He’d picked up the energy blade the attacker had dropped, examined it briefly, swished it once and then dropped it. He still hadn’t said a word or asked a question, to Wufei’s utter lack of surprise.

“They’re called the Hadat Ton,” he supplied anyway. Then his mouth twisted in faint distaste as he added, “the more idiotic citizens of the galaxy call them ‘space ninjas’, I believe. They’re an elite force of mercenaries specializing in sabotage and assassination. They’ve been known to work with Juusan on occasion. Seems they still take his coin.”

Heero didn’t even bother with a “Hn.” He looked unimpressed with the resume of their attackers.

Shenlong’s comm unit crackled. “Sir?”

“Report,” Wufei ordered curtly.

“Two attackers found and neutralized. The EM sweep didn’t provide any indication, but, um, the blond guy here, he says he works with you, um-”

“Winner, yes.”

“Right, he ordered us, that is, he, um-”

“He told you where the attackers were,” Wufei interpreted impatiently. Dragons usually had a strict chain of command and were intolerant of civilians trying to butt in, but these were obviously exceptional circumstances. “It’s fine, obey him as you would me. Just be careful of the explosives.”

“Yessir, the other stranger, he shot this crossbow where the blond- Winner said, and for some reason the explosive trap didn’t trigger on the second nin- Hadat.”

“Good. Continue to follow their directives. Ask Winner- do you have a spare comms? Give Barton and Winner a unit, and tell them to call me if they need me or Yuy to intervene anywhere.”

“Yessir. Yuy, that’s the bearer of Wing? Winner says he’s exactly where he needs to be already, said he told Yuy to go where he is and wait.”

Wufei rolled his eyes. “Of course he did,” he muttered. Like a game of twelve-stones being replayed for him, the sequence of this morning’s events unfolded. The Hadat Ton’s greatest weapon was the element of surprise, but that wouldn’t fly with the bearer of Zero around, and anything Quatre would miss, Trowa would immediately pick up from the tread of feet, however invisible, on the earth near him. Wufei was ready to bet that the Hadat’s plan had been to infiltrate the Sanctuary through several points of ingress, plant bombs in each chamber and leave before anyone the wiser, but their strategy had been effectively derailed before it even began. 

“Wufei. Heero is at a nexus, he’s fine.” Quatre’s voice crackled onto the comm. He was talking in the Zero voice again. “I need you to patrol around and disrupt their redeployment.”

“Disrupt how?” Wufei asked (rather than ‘what’s a nexus and shouldn’t I stand on one too?’) His eyes and scanners ran over the heap of stones around them. Heero had gone completely still and passive again.

“Just move around. You’re one of their secondary targets,” Quatre said as assuredly as if he’d been reading the Hadat’s mission directives over their leader’s shoulder. “Having you mobile will cause them to realign their- just walk around and kill any you find, your instincts are sufficient to let you get the drop on them,” he added tersely. “No- you- Trowa, tell that man to stand _here_ -” The communicator cut off. 

Quatre and Trowa seemed to have their sector in hand. Heero was… well, presumably Quatre knew what Heero was doing here, probably more than Heero did. Wufei didn’t wonder at Heero’s blind obedience towards Zero’s directives anymore, he was developing much the same reliance himself after all, having had too many proofs of the arcane spell’s effectiveness. What was odd was that Duo had mentioned Heero had had the same unquestioning compliance towards Trowa and Quatre’s requests long before Zero had ever come into the picture. One more oddity about the man...

Wufei took off at a jog, looking around as he ran towards the area Svale referred to as the ‘dining room’, and which everybody else called the picnic area. Now that the Sanctuary was bursting at the seams with people, on fair days the inhabitants and patrollers gathered to eat and talk at tables and chairs Trowa had built outside. Past the picnic area was the rambling multi-chambered living quarters, wattle and daub and crude slate a contrast to the moors and the Jishin stones around it. The three hearthstones that fueled the shield spell were heavily warded, but there was an entrance in Svale’s hovel that lead down to the Source itself. ‘Walk around’ was a bit vague, Wufei decided he should do something constructive such as check on a potential chink in their defenses.

Winner, Barton, Yuy, the Dragons… There was only one of the Sanctuary’s defenders missing at this point. He’d been missing a lot. The only time Wufei had seen Duo these past two weeks was when it was his turn to spar with Wufei or Heero, or at night for an hour or so for one of their trysts. It wasn’t Wufei’s place to ask where the irritating vagabond spent his time when he wasn’t training, so he hadn’t. But if the Jishin wasn’t around to protect his Sanctuary, then that was a problem that would need to be addressed. Though for that, he-

Past the picnic area, off to one side of the living quarters, an oddity jumped out at Wufei; a gleaming machine the shape and size of a motorbike but with considerably more power in the motor, a stark contrast to the simple wooden furniture and the crude building beyond it. An orbit dropper. Belonging to one of the Hadat, almost certainly. Someone - their leader or a key fighter - had been aboard a ship far overhead, or had been following the attack over ether-comm channels from an outpost nearby, and had used this to come and help once it was obvious the sneak attack had gone belly up. Where-

The entrance to the living quarters was fifty yards up ahead, far enough where Wufei might have thought he’d imagined the faint flicker, like a heatwave, darting into the entrance. Wufei, however, was not known for his imagination. Shit! Shenlong’s energy wings flared to life to shoot Wufei towards the building. He’d have to maneuver the attacker out before killing him, there were precious books and resources in lying about that were needed in order to manage the shield spell and-

A soft _whooomph_ preceded a shape hurtling out the door on a flat trajectory as if propelled from a canon. Wufei barely ducked in time. He watched as the intruder was shot straight out past the barrier, eventually hitting the sod of the moors far beyond. A few seconds later, another explosion rocked the increasingly noisy morning.

Heero was at his six, so who had done that? Had to be Duo. He’d teleported straight in, good. Wufei turned back towards the living quarters, to catch the Jishin up on the current state of affairs-

A screech echoed out of the living quarters, piggybacking on the echoes of the explosion. “You only get to walk in on me bathing if you’re gorgeous, fucker! You don’t qualify!” 

Wufei, High Dragon of Jiachan, warlord, mercenary leader and strategist down to his deadly fingertips, did a smooth one eighty and went the other way. He’d never fully grasped the extent of Svale’s powers beyond her invulnerability, but they were obviously sufficient to protect her home. Any of these idiots who managed to sneak past him into the living quarters would be entering the mouth of madness, and Wufei, for one, was in no hurry to follow on their heels. Now-

A flicker at the corner of his eye.

Wufei spun, body a deadly weapon ready to defend and riposte- only the attack did not materialize. Shenlong threw up filters on the HUD in vain- then finally hit a frequency on the EM scan that showed a vague ripple in the grid it had cast over the battlefield. The attacker who had been leaping towards Wufei’s back appeared to be hanging in mid-air…

A crackle was followed by a spark. Wufei could see his would-be assailant with both eyes now, the camo field had stopped working. The man was indeed hanging in mid-air, arms and legs waving madly as if trying to swim. Wufei, fang pointed straight at the assassin’s center mass, paused, puzzled.

As he watched, the mercenary, still gesticulating wildly, started to float up. Ten feet. Twenty. The man’s energy blade tumbled through the air as the assassin started frantically pawing at his belt for some other tool, but still his pace accelerated. Wufei finally glanced around.

Duo, unperturbed, was leaning against one of the nearby menhirs, one hand lifted, palm up and fingers loosely flexed without much apparent effort. Finally he made a small throwing gesture, ending in a finger gun. He didn’t even look up at the explosion high overhead as he sauntered towards Wufei.

“Hey, Chang. Space ninjas at the crack of dawn, heh? The Scourge has no class.”

“Did they damage anything?” Wufei asked tightly, glancing around.

“Nope, though there’s a stone from the Barrier of Teeth that’s lost its arcane charge near the second hearthstone. I’ll go down and look for it in a minute. It’ll be easy to find; it’ll be the one with an interesting stone statue of a ninja next to it. Maybe we should try to sell it, it could be a new trend in art-”

“You set traps in our home base?!”

“Yup. And a good thing too. And that I chose the Bone Hold petrification spell rather than anything flammable, because that guy back there-”

“Explosives, I know.”

“Don’t worry, I made sure that the traps are not triggered by any of our auras. By ‘ours’, I mean the five of us and Svale. I have made it known to the wardens and anyone else around that they are on their own if they wander away from the picnic area or Svale’s hovel.”

Wufei felt like he should lose his temper over this information, yet the anger did not materialize; because if nothing else, he did trust Duo to know how to set up a magic spell. The lack of anger paradoxically annoyed him for reasons he could not explain, so he turned on his heels with a curt: “Warn us next time so we concentrate on the least defended areas. I’m going to run a perimeter sweep.”

“Oh, wait!”

“What?” Wufei asked over his shoulder, suddenly not wishing to linger around annoying Jishin. 

“Um.”

There was a pause.

Wufei didn’t really want to, but his curiosity piqued him to turn around to see what a hesitant Duo looked like. 

Duo was standing there, a dozen different feelings fleeting over his mobile face. He was tapping what looked like a black baton against his left palm. The object, the length of his forearm, made a solid sound at each tap, as if it were made of solid wood. 

“Yes?”

“Ah. You know we gotta be optimal when we kick immortal ass, right?”

“Get to the point.” 

“Well, it’s just, you don’t have a weapon. I know, I know, fists of death and dragon fangs and everything, but-“

“My weapons - other than my fangs and my fists - were broken when I attacked Juusan back on Jiachan. I don’t have the time or the Gundanium to build more. Other weapons would likely misfire under Center’s arcane interference. You know this. I need to go verify the perimeter.”

“They’re all dead. This whole area is like a radar to me,” Duo said. “That’s why I knew shit was going down.”

“Where were you?” Wufei asked, the question he’d not wanted to ask a dozen times slipping out perfectly against his will.

“I was working on something.” Duo tilted his head vaguely off to one side. Maybe in the direction of his hidden springs, or the nearest town or the nearest brothel for all Wufei knew. Or cared, he reminded himself.

“I hope it’s important,” Wufei grumbled. “It was your Sanctuary under attack, after all.”

“I knew you guys could handle watching the place.” Duo scratched the back of his head, looking blindly around the rocks and dells of his race’s last bastion. “It was important, what I was working on, and I’m done now, that’s what I was getting to.”

“In a very roundabout way. Do I have to hit you to get you to be direct?”

“Fine.” Duo’s energy seemed to return in a temperamental flash. “Here, got something for you, it’s a weapon, it’s Jishin but don’t turn your nose up at it or I will ram it up your fucking ass and anyway you need something to swing at the Scourge so it might as well be this.”

Wufei took a few seconds to deconstruct that run-on sentence. Then he reached out towards the baton Duo had thrust at him.

Duo jerked it back as if he’d received a shock. His face contorted briefly.

“What the fuck, Maxwell?”

“It’s okay, it’s okay, just- you know-...” Duo made a jerky gesture to a space an inch above his chestnut mop. 

”...No. Don’t tell me the bloody dead choir is giving you grief for handing me a weapon to fight our _mutual enemy._ ”

“Just some of them. Arg.” Duo hit himself in the head - hard, it left a mark, which the glass amour writhed over like a fussy mother. 

”What is that?” Wufei asked, looking at the stick which really didn’t seem to warrant any reaction, much less this one. “I hate to agree with those dead remnants over anything, but an arcane weapon is not something I could even use-...I recognize that, it’s what you picked up on the Cabalist man o’war.” It’d been one of the arcane weapons littering the place.

“Yeah,” Duo said, looking a little surprised. “I fixed it. Took me awhile. Been working on it when I have the time.”

Wufei lifted narrowed eyes to scrutinize Duo’s features. Maybe this should worry him, but he was starting to see the currents ripping this Maxwell creature apart. The dead did not want one of their weapons going to an ancestral enemy. A weapon Duo had spent his spare time fixing for Wufei. 

Wufei stuck out a hand. 

Duo looked surprised but handed it over. He winced several times.

Wufei examined it. “I understand why you put in the effort, Maxwell,” he said. “But I don’t see how I can use an arcane weapon.”

“Oof,” Duo murmured, rubbing his temples.

“They’re bad today,” Wufei stated, looking up.

“You have no idea. Here, you just need to turn it on. You see, I remembered some stuff Howard had said about Gundanium mechas and their ability to tap into the psyche to run a lot of their functions and interface with their owners. He gave me his research back when I was figuring out who’d have the best chance of using Wing against the Big Bad. I gotta confess, at the time I was thinking magic users. I didn’t know any High Dragons had survived. And nobody in their sane mind - or me either - knew somebody like Heero was waltzing around. I tried to see how I could adapt mecha to interface with magic. So, well, I kinda did something a bit similar, but in reverse: adapted magic to use with a mecha. Just so you can will it to turn on. It’s fundamental arcane element is Fire, it’s-“

A keening whine buried his words and a lance of light hurled itself up towards the sky. Backwash blew out like stormwinds and knocked over the nearby wooden picnic table and three of the stools.

Wufei staggered back, arm out. 

A spear. A spear of light and magma; it shone with the wild cruelty of fire, it burned like the hunter’s last line of defense against every wild beast in the dark.

Power rippled and stabilized. Wufei realized he’d used one of Shenlong’s psychic programs instinctively, the way he’d control the deployment of his energy wings with a thought, among other functions. He narrowed his eyes, tried to modulate it...but the spear did not respond. The connection was crude. But he was amazed Duo had managed to do this much. Maybe Wufei could refine it...? 

He swished it around. It was still as light as the baton which his fist still gripped. Whereas the rest of the spear looked like molten gold and red lava, the baton had become a gripping handle, now decorated with a five red gems and a delicate filigree pattern. It was...beautiful. A bit shorter than a traditional Dragon lance, but he should be able to rely on his familiarity with that weapon. He lifted it above his head and brought it down, then stabbed forward.

Power rippled out like silk and the invader’s drop pod thirty feet away burst into flame. At his side, Duo made a crowing sound. 

Wufei reached out a careful hand towards the shaft of the spear, expecting it to be hot. But it felt warm, like blood running through veins. He straightened and examined the tip as it glinted, a flame hammered into the shape of a blade. Not that he needed to study it this intently - the arcane was a mystery to him. Not that he was actually seeing it anyway. It was just because when he stopped examining the weapon, he’d have to turn towards Duo and he could not begin to think what the could say to the man...this was just...

A groan made him turn around in alarm. Duo’s eyes were squeezed shut in pain.

“What is it?!”

“Ah. Nothing. S’okay.”

“What?” Wufei insisted.

“Um, they’re a bit pissy. That’s all.”

“Pissy?”

“Ignore it. So, think you can use it?”

Wufei stared at him, then at the spear. 

He triggered another psychic command via Shenlong’s interface, and the fire disappeared in a flicker like a candle guttering, leaving only the black stick. Then he handed it back to Duo.

“Oh. Don’t want it.” Duo’s face - white and strained though it was - did not look surprised.

“I _do._ ”

Wufei’s words were curt, that was just the way he was, but he hoped that their intensity expressed fully just how much they really meant.

Duo blinked. Then blinked again. “Dude, if you want it, keep it. Don’t worry about the grumps, they’ll get over it.”

“This weapon is important to them, I take it.”

“Oh ash and blood, you have no idea! Ow. Urg.” Duo rubbed his temples with hands that were shaking. “Yeah, it’s from the Cleyfere era, and it...if I told you its history, the Scourge would join us somewhere near the end of it to listen in as well. It’s powerful. Those Cabalists seemed to have had a hard-on for rare Jishin kickassery. They must have been ever so proud when their Orb of O Bugger That could absorb its attack - though I bet they did not know how to turn it on fully or they’d have blown their gizmo all to hell and a chunk out of their ship to boot. You need to start working with it now to master even a portion of its potential, but right outta the box, it’ll do a lotta damage, and, well, you handling it looked real good. I mean, deadly. Um.” Duo looked flustered. 

“Duo.”

“Hm?”

When he’d gone back to Jiachan to bury his dead, scavengers had already set up residence there. He’d killed them, but Wing was gone, pilfered by undeserving strangers. Of course it had ultimately gone to Duo and to Heero, starting a sequence of events that might just save the galaxy, but two wrongs still did not make a right.

“Your dead are right to be upset. I will not take a relic of your race without their permission.”

Duo stared, and from the way his shoulders unknotted, the choir had shut up and was staring too. “But- but you need a weapon, man,” he finally said. 

“I do. If there’s anything I can do to prove to them I am worthy-“

Duo flinched, slapping his hands over his face as he burst out into a series of Old Tongue words, short, sharp and bitten off.

Wufei winced internally, eyes dropping down to the spear. He...was going to have to give it back. A thing of such deadly beauty, even if it was arcane. Hell, it didn’t matter if it was made of magic; when he’d scythed it through the air, or held it up- just having it at his side felt...right. 

Deep in Wufei’s mind, a memory twitched. 

“I’ve seen this spear before.”

Duo lifted his face away from his hands a fraction, his entire expression frozen in a wince. “Yeah, I picked it up in the battleship’s weapons lab, we established that.”

“Yes, but also in that vision you showed us, of the council where they decided to try to negotiate with the Scourge. It belonged to that Jishin in the red armor, the one nearest the window.”

“Yeah, old lord Seneker.” Duo and the dead watched Wufei, as if wondering where he was going with this.

“Can you ask _him_ about this?” Wufei asked, moved by intuition and a memory of that man.

“Uh, it doesn’t work like that, not for me. The soul-mind is corrupted, plus they’re- oh wait.” Duo blinked. “Okay, he’s coherent and must have been waiting for this, because he’s right there-...oh. Vaan. Sessori?”

“What did he say?” Wufei asked. “His hand was on this last.” His hand and Duo’s.

Duo’s eyes drifted as if the response was scrolling before his vision Then he grinned, and Wufei felt obscurely relieved to see his Jishin (well, that is, the version he was familiar with) come to the fore. 

“I’m gonna quote him exactly here, okay? He said, ‘Kid, give The Glaive to the fucking dragon and let him stick it in Juusan’s craw. If he does that, he can keep it forever and give it to his descendants to boot.’”

Wufei drew back his hand and brought the weapon to his chest, against Shenlong’s heart piece in a reflex salute. “Acceptable.”

“Hah. I shoulda known he’d say that.” Duo whistled, eyes inwards. “Man, it’s a cat fight in there now, but I’m no longer on the hot seat.” Lines of pain were dissolving on his forehead.

Wufei remembered the man sitting on his throne of stone and grousing about Juusan and how the rest of his people were blind idiots to let the Scourge anywhere near them. He’d had a feeling he and that man would be on the same wavelength. As much as he could be with a- oh fuck it. Jishin or not, that man had been a warrior. He and Wufei thought alike.

“I’ll show him - and the rest - that I am worthy of it,” Wufei said, turning the weapon on again in a more controlled manner this time, the red light warm and deadly in equal measure. “Glaive? Is that what it’s called?”

“The Glaive, yes, that’s its name. Only one was ever made, in the death throes of a sun back in the days of Power." 

“The Glaive,” Wufei murmured, judging the heft once more. “I wonder… when we have some time, show me the psychic integration you made to allow me to turn it on. I will see if I can improve it.”

“Sure thing, that would- oh, Heero? Hi bud.”

Wufei looked around. Heero was standing twenty feet away, staring.

“Ah, apologies, Yuy. You must have been alarmed by the power and light. I hadn’t expected that strong a reaction.” How long had Heero been there? Had he come running as soon as the spear had come out? He’d not said anything though.

Heero lifted his chin. 

“Weapon,” he said.

Wufei stiffened. At his side, Duo did as well. Duo had told Wufei about Heero’s obsession with finding new and better weapons when they’d first met.

The obvious objection - ‘You have the saber’ - was only the second that came to mind, the first more primal one being, ‘Back off, Duo gave this to _me._ ’

“Er, yeah, it’s a weapon, but you don’t need it, and Wu does,” Duo said carefully, as if treading around a landmine.

Heero was still staring at them fixedly. 

“Heero? Come on, we’re all friends.”

“Yes.”

“Good. And you don’t need The Glaive, you have-”

Heeros’ eyes dropped to The Glaive in Wufei’s hand. “I don’t want that,” he said dismissively. 

“Oh. Oh good. Um, then what were you-“

“The friend is the weapon. Now he is whole and complete.”

On that pronouncement, he turned on his heels and walked away.

Duo and Wufei glanced at each other. Wufei leaned against The Glaive in a way that would soon undoubtedly feel familiar. 

“So...what exactly was your reasoning in pinning all of your hopes of defeating Juusan on our enigmatic friend a few months back?”

Duo was scratching his head at the root of his braid. “He was powerful enough to fight the Scourge, and batshit crazy enough to actually want to do it. He was first in line in a queue of exactly one person.”

“Wonderful.”

“Well, the dice is cast.”

“That it is.” Wufei looked down at The Glaive. Their chances had just gotten better. “It’s more than weaponry,” he added on the heels of that thought. “Heero won’t be fighting on his own now. We have to be greater than the sum of our parts, and that implies flawless communication. To which end, I have a comm unit for you.” He’d felt the lack of it cruelly at the start of the attack. 

“Huh? I told you, man, I’m arcane, I hate machines, no way no how am I wearing a gizmo on my head, magic and tech are not meant to-...”

Duo blinked repeatedly at The Glaive that Wufei had started twirling idly in his hand. Their eyes met over the fan of flames and gold.

“Oh, well played.”

“Since I had no idea you were going to give me this, it was not intentional, but I am too good a strategies not to capitalize on an advantage when I see it,” Wufei said smoothly.

“...Does this comm thing have a lot of buttons? I don’t do well with buttons.”

“It has no buttons at all.” Wufei’s lips pinched, but then again he had no cause to be miserly now. “It’s gundanium.”

“Say what now?”

“Your spirit armor would interfere with anything else. Center’s background magic alone plays merry havoc with anything from CB to ether-comms-”

“Yeah, even carrier pigeons have been known to fly into rocks around here,” Duo put in.

“Gundanium armor - the mechas - interface with the psyche, as you pointed out. This aligns well enough with your petty magic tricks. It’s not a full mecha, of course.” Wufei snorted at the very idea. “It’s that piece I picked up in your hideout months ago. The one you sneaked from some other scavenger before you.”

“Huh-uh. Wait, that? I thought it was trashed.”

“I wasn’t going to leave it broken. I could have used it as spare parts for Wing or Shenlong if our headpieces were damaged,” Wufei informed him as he took off towards the _Anstra_.

“Huh.” Duo seemed to digest that as he walked by his side, then glanced up with sudden interest. “Does it have a name? It’s gotta have a cool name if you want me to use it.”

“It’s a tiny piece. It wouldn’t even have a letter.”

“If it did, I’d call it Y,” Duo muttered, following Wufei in a slouchy walk. “As in, why the hell are you giving me this?”

“You can give it a name if it makes you feel better,” said Wufei in a tone that indicated he was giving a sop to a child. 

“It’s gotta be an awesome name. Something with ‘death’ in it.”

“Yes yes. It will do for a communicator for you in the meantime." 

“...This thing’s gonna cling to my hair, ain’t it.”

“Live with it.”

“Guess I’ll need to.”

“Good. Come on, I’ll go get it, we’ll fit it on and then we need to go find some targets.” The Glaive was a warm, comforting weight in his hand.

“Lots more targets,” Duo agreed with a renewed bounce to his step.

\---

Next Chapter: Heartbeat Five

What's worse than fighting an impossible battle against an immortal all-powerful adversary? The night before said battle, waiting for the onslaught to arrive in the morning. Okay, technically it's not _worse_ , but it's definitely more tedious. Gotta find something to do...


	45. Heartbeat Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posting this a day early as my Sunday will be suuuuper busy. Plus it's a short chapter - and sorry, it turned out bittersweet rather than smutty ^^;

Trowa had turned down the volume, but in the silence of their room, the buzz of the communicator still sounded loud. He paused with his fingers on the fletching of the bolt he was finishing.

A voice, almost a whisper, announced a series of numbers that would make sense to a technologist. Then there was a crackle, and Howard picked up the mic. 

“That’s confirmed it, then. The Libra has entered the solar system. The big guy will be here by 3:00 CMT - morning for you folks in base 1. Torgue, hook into our group on channel Peacemillion CO1, we need to coordinate-”

With a bit of fiddling, Trowa found the small button that turned the communicator off. Silence leaped out at him from the corners of the room. He finished wrapping the fletching, tested the strength of the bolt, the residual _zing_ of the spell carved into the shaft, then he dropped it into his quiver. He wondered if he’d have any targets tomorrow. But best be prepared.

His eyes drifted to the figure sitting on the window sill, staring out into the gathering night. Not that Quatre could see any of it, or hear the communicator, or notice the present hush in the room. 

Trowa once more sorted through the bolts, verifying that every one of them was in its set space in the quiver. He’d already verified the crossbow’s mechanisms, and communed across the Lines of the Earth with S. How kind of the Scourge to time his arrival for the day after a full moon. 

Not that the Scourge cared for the power of Nightwalkers. Or of Center. If the moon were a problem, he’d probably blow it out of the sky on his way down…

“Done.”

Trowa started and almost cut himself on the bolt he’d been fingering while deep in bleak thought. 

Quatre jumped down from the sill and made his way over. “Are you finished?” he asked, glance resting on the weapon and bolts on Trowa’s small workbench.

”...Yes.”

“Good.”

”Are you done?” Trowa had not expected anything other than silence tonight.

“No, calculations are still running.” Quatre’s eyes drifted back to the window. “But I’ve detached myself from the process. I need rest.”

Trowa nodded and stood up to stretch. “So do I. So, what does Zero think? Do we have a hope in hell?”

“Yes,” said Quatre unexpectedly, gaze turned inwards as he walked up to the shaman. “But I can’t give you odds. Too many variables. And only one constant.”

“Hm, let me guess. The wheel turns?” Trowa had no delusions about the the danger they faced, and for a nightwalker, death was a part of life.

“Actually-” Quatre interrupted himself with a shake of his head. “That one’s surprisingly up for debate, but I’m not going into it now. No, this is the constant I meant.”

An assured hand turned Trowa’s face around and into a firm kiss.

His heart skipped a beat. It always would. 

“Yes,” Quatre whispered - had he followed the thought? “We have us. We will always have us. Even if we die tomorrow...this will have always been true.”

Nightwalkers did not pray as such, they knew the earth did not listen, did not grant requests, yet still, as he pressed their lips together again, still the words trickled through his mind. _Please, Center...if death is coming tomorrow, then let us at least die together…_

Trowa broke the kiss, peppered a gentler one on the lips beneath his, and then brought his lover close. “Thank you.”

“I wasn’t going to let you go to sleep alone now,” said Quatre with a silvery laugh.

“No. For letting me come with you tomorrow.”

“You’re not thanking me for having sex, but you’re thanking me for dragging you into one of the worst fights in history? Maybe you need a Zero, your priorities are skewed.”

“You’re right. I know where they are,” said Trowa, letting himself be lead towards the bed. Quatre did not want to spend this night - this last night perhaps - on sad things, and he was right. Trowa would join him in this loving moment tonight, and tomorrow he would join him on Wufei’s spinnet, piloted by one of his fellow Dragons. They would not teleport with Duo, but the planet hopper would take them to the most likely spot of the fight, and hope Zero was right in its estimation. Quatre had insisted he would have to be there, to watch. The others had agreed. Trowa would be virtually useless facing Juusan; he might be more useful back at Sanctuary in case the Scourge’s mundane army attacked again and ran the gauntlet of Duo’s beefed up defenses. 

There would be formidable defenses at the Sanctuary. And Juusan was the ultimate target. Trowa might not be able to do much, but he’d started this ages ago, and nobody had suggested he not follow this line to the end.

But that would be tomorrow. Tonight, a gentle hand bore him down and reached for his belt.

 

\---

 

To say the least, Wufei was no stranger to battles. He’d had dozens of these days or nights, setting up the last preparations. The buzz in his nerves, the static of ‘last chance to get it right’ burning through his mind, was so familiar that it fit like a glove, he’d probably lose at least 20% of his efficiency without it.

Every piece was falling into place. The last minute glitch in the communication net was on its way to being resolved, high level intel was already getting through, and Howard’s lot were setting up switches to deal with ship-to-ship and lower level orders. Call signs and security protocols were agreed on and being propagated throughout their motley fleet, weapons were warming up, engines getting their last inspection. The Dragons under his command needed no handholding for all this. Though none of them were High Dragons, or members of any particularly prestigious clan, this was still second nature to them. Wufei just had to make sure that they worked harmoniously with the Sweepers, the ship full of mages that the warden, G, had brought together, the nightwalkers down on the ground and any and all troops that Trowa had seemingly pulled out of thin air. That, and Wufei made sure that every Dragon knew they had to obey Quatre and Trowa as if the pair of them were Wufei himself, no ifs, ands or buts. 

While listening to chatter across the channels, his eyes drifted towards a solitary figure perched cross legged on one of the dolmens. A few words drifted through his mind; sentences started and then dangled. Last night on earth- no, that was ridiculous and defeatist. Were you going to actually sleep-... 

Buzz, static, last chance to get it right… he buried himself in the familiar feeling to insulate himself against those thoughts and emotions that were not business as usual. This was not a war of conquest, or a duel of honor; this was the single most important battle Chang Wufei would fight in his life, the stakes, both personal and for the galaxy, were beyond imagining. But it was still a battle, and he knew how to prepare for those.

More words bubbled up from the throb of thoughts, congregating together piece by piece… I doubt you faithless Jishin pray before battle, so if you have nothing better to do than squat on a rock… Get our minds off the annoyance of having to wait a few hours before we end it. We’ve both been resting these past few days, were you going to sleep? No rough stuff, of course, keep your inner alley cat under control or I’ll find someone a bit more rational to fuck. I probably should. But who knows what you’d do in that instance, and unfortunately our strategy depends on you tomorrow, so I’d rather keep an eye on you. 

“Torgue, Vali, Howard, I’m signing off. Get me on my channel if you need me.”

Some echoes of ‘will do’, ‘goodnight’ and ‘go in glory’ were cut off with a click as he put his comms on mute. Shenlong would reactivate them if it detected anything requiring his attention. 

The previous day, the Sanctuary had been a hive of activity as Sweepers, Dragons and others gathered, prepared defenses, met and argued with new allies, received orders. Tonight all was calm, everyone was resting or at their station. The breeze carried only bird noises and the churr of insects, highlighting the quiet in which floated the clouds and a full moon, it’s purity marred by the glistening of the planetary shield. It looked peaceful, but Wufei knew that the sky was an almost solid mass of metal, weapons and surveillance nets. Here and there, his practiced eye caught a glimmer. Satelites, automated missile silos, ships - and that double star there would be the Peacemillion’s twin engines. Howard always flew around in that weird junker of his, who knew how he’d pulled a battleship out of his hat… A good addition, though Wufei would have felt happier with a hundred Dragons at the controls rather than the less battle-hardened Sweepers. 

Buzz, static, last chance to get it right… 

His boots crunched through grass and sod, and bit into the side of the mound as he started to climb the slope. It was the dirt mound that rose above the hearthstone chamber he and Duo often put to use. Duo was sitting on a stone that capped it, elbows on his knees, hands loosely clasped. As Wufei rounded the promontory and started to climb, the Jishin’s face gradually became revealed. Afraid? Worried? Cowering before his own certain doom? As if. Duo’s face had such a look of peace on it that Wufei’s steps slowed to a stop. 

Peace, acceptance, relief that six long years of plotting were finally coming to a head… but there was a faint smirk hovering at the corner of those mobile lips, and Wufei felt his own mouth quirk. Peace and acceptance were all well and good, but the small part of Duo that could still be called Duo was also looking forward to kicking Juusan in the nuts before going down swinging. Wufei realized that he’d really not expected anything else. He stayed silent awhile, watching Duo watch the stars. An odd feeling of tranquility crept over him. 

Finally blue eyes focused and twitched. Duo turned his head to blink down at Wufei. 

There’d been phrases in his mind. Wufei couldn’t remember why right this minute.

He tilted his head to the left and down, towards their chamber’s entrance.

Duo contemplated that for a few seconds, then grinned like Death had finally gotten the punchline. “Sure thing. Let’s use it before we lose it. Gotta be the one thing Juusan will never get about us, heh?”

Wufei shook his head minimally. “There are many, many things Juusan will never, ah, ‘get’ about us. That’s just one of them.”

“Hah, you said it.” Duo pounced to his feet and sauntered down to Wufei’s level. A disrespectful hand somehow managed to grope him in passing. Wufei made the requisite death threat and followed a bouncing braid up ahead.

 

\---

 

The One and Only looked out over the Sanctuary. His guide was resting now. His friend would follow soon. Heero nodded fractionally. 

The presence above was not yet within striking distance, but Heero could sense him. It felt like the moon was tumbling towards the ground, the air compressing ahead of it. Soon, Heero’s target would be here.

Good. Time to accomplish his mission. 

Yet his eyes drifted off towards the hearthstone chamber where his friend was. 

Heero knew what was to come. 

There was a feeling in his middle. It made him think of what it’d felt like after Center had used him as a conduit and then left him alone once more. 

But these creatures who had gathered around him...they were doomed. They were already gone. 

There was only the mission.

 

\---

 

Svale perched upon the highest rock in the Sanctuary and hurled the empty bottle as far as she could. It pirouetted through the air and shattered against a venerable leystone.

“Don’ give me that look!” Svale shouted at it. “At leasht Juushan won’t be dish- disan- dising- blowin’ up _that_ one!”

She burped and patted the rock beneath her. 

“You there, old girl?”

She wasn’t talking to the stone, or the Sanctuary, or the source beneath it, neither was she talking to herself exactly. She was talking to the mother of them all.

“Welp, sign of the times and all that. Hmmm. You know, I wish you could talk sometimes, Center. I got the weirdest feeling...” Svale thoughtfully uncorked the next bottle in line. She’d have to go make a supply run soon. Assuming they were still sucking oxygen twenty four hours from now. 

“There’s stuff here. Undercurrents. They’re tinglin’ in my cockles. Why is that? Juusan comes, he either smacks us down or we fuck him over but good. Black or white...Right? Hmmm...No. Doesn’t feel that straightforward. We’re in over our heads- well that’s a given, but there’s something else here. And you know it, girl. If you don't have wheels within wheels going here, then I’m a fifteen year old virgin.”

Svale took a swig and looked up at the moon. “Hope you know what you’re doin’. Well, you usually do. To you, Center! Long may you spin!” 

 

\---

 

Out on the moor, a nightjar called. 

It would be morning in a few hours.

 

\---

 

Next chapter: The Sky Breaks Open

Shit be going down.


	46. The Sky Breaks Open

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Parts of this chapter and the next have been in the works for nigh on fifteen years. I am so excited to finally post this that I am practically vibrating.  
> A big shout-out to my sound box crew ^__^ Thanks for letting me bounce these two monster parts off of ya!

Wufei, Duo and Heero waited in silence near the top of the Sanctuary. 

A battle raged far above their heads. It came across as dry numbers flashing in Wufei’s left eye. Twice, high above in the blue sky dappled with clouds, there’d been a flash. Other than that, the early morning seemed inappropriately fresh and sunny.

The words “Nothing yet,” crackled over the comm. The message was from Corzo, the Dragon flying the Anstra some two thousand miles from the Sanctuary, at the coordinates Quatre had dictated to him. Corzo’s voice was tight. He obviously thought that flying one of their few precious armed ships away from the orbital battle and into the middle of nowhere was completely loopy as far as plans went. Part of Wufei worried he might be right. 

Where are you, you bastard...? 

Then the comm crackled again.

It was Quatre’s voice. He said simply: “He’s here.”

Adrenaline shot through Wufei’s abdomen. His grip on The Glaive tightened. It wasn’t just the knowledge that the battle was upon them that had sent that hot spike of bloody-minded anticipation through him, it was that Quatre had successfully predicted Juusan’s touchdown site. Their strategist, at least, could hold his ground against the imponderable immortal being. Now it was up to the rest of them to prove they could as well. 

“Here goes nothing,” Duo said, hand landing on Wufei’s shoulder. His other would be on Heero’s. The three of them had waited at the Sanctuary just in case the enemy forces overwhelmed their orbital positions (or in case Quatre was wrong about Juusan’s first move.) It made their deployment flexible, as long as they didn’t mind the means to get to their main target now that the latter had appeared. 

Wufei grimaced reflexively. Teleportation had to be his least favorite means of travel, right after falling to earth in a burning escape pod. But at least it was virtually instantaneous. One moment they were staring at the moorlands around the Sanctuary. Then one second of wrenching dematerialisation later - a forest, tundra-cool, early evening in this timezone by the looks of it, with pines stretching as far as the eye could see. They were on a promontory, a short cliff rearing just above the treeline. Wufei took it all in with a glance and then looked up.

Juusan.

“Well fuck me, you don’t see that every day,” Duo mused. 

Wufei had expected Juusan to attack aboard the Libra. Or use a landing ship. But the Libra had been over their heads near the Sanctuary, still out in orbit. How Juusan had gotten here was a mystery, but how he planned to make it down to the ground wasn’t. He was still somewhere past the mesosphere, according to Shenlong’s targeting system, but since he appeared to be about a kilometer tall, he could already be seen clearly with the naked eye.

“Oh, I see. Kinda like spirit armor. But a bit bigger.” Duo’s grin was all teeth as he stared at their enemy approaching fast. “Q? Did you expect this? Any ideas on how to hit him when we’re like ants?”

“Just hit him.” The voice would have been warmer and cuddlier coming from a computer. Winner was in battle mode.

Wufei’s eyes narrowed. The gigantic figure falling to earth appeared to be in an old-fashioned knightly armor, some pre-Cull design. Details and material could not be made out at this distance. Not that tensile strength mattered here, if Duo was right. Spirit armor could look like a ballerina tutu and still be impenetrable. Wufei wondered when his internal monologue had picked up some Duo-isms…

“This place looks good,” he said, glancing around. “Heero, wait until he’s two clicks away- wait until Quatre tells you to and then use Wing like I showed you. We’ll have to take this battle into the air or we’ll be punching him in the toes. Duo-“

“Come down on him like a ton of psychic bricks, I know.”

Wufei spun the short baton of The Glaive’s resting form in his armored fist, caught it and gripped hard. “Let’s do-“

‘This’ died in Wufei’s mouth and his eyes narrowed. The giant had - however impossibly - slowed and then skidded to a dead halt in mid-air.

“Scatter if he aims at us,” Wufei hissed.

Duo’s hand was still on his shoulder. If Shenlong hadn’t been energized, the grip would have been bruising. Wufei wanted to glance at the Jishin, see how he was holding up now that he was finally face to face with the murderer of his people again, but he couldn’t afford the distraction.

Then- for a sliver of a heartbeat, Wufei thought the Scourge was _running_ \- dishonorable cur! But no, the effect of distance was due to the fact that he was shrinking. The target analyzer confirmed. Mass decreasing, even as the distance was closing. 

The armored creature had a weapon. A lance. It looked modeled after a Dragon’s lance. Wufei buried the irrational feeling of utter fury that threatened to distract him beneath the icy calm of the warrior. If it was a thermal lance, it could shoot at them at this distance already.

Wait for it… wait for it...

The figure slowed to a stop a click away. He’d shrunk to about six hundred meters in height, Wufei estimated.

“Is that loss of mass due to the shield?” Wufei hissed.

“Dunno.”

“Is he attacking on the arcane plane yet?”

”...No.”

“Winner? Ideas? Suggestions?”

“A notion why he’s not atomized us already?” Duo tagged on in a mutter.

“He is evaluating. There is something here he did not expect,” came the cold voice over the comms. 

“YOU.”

The voice echoed like a sonic boom. In the distance separating them from the enemy, trees creaked and small things scurried down the branches to hide.

Wufei lifted his chin. So the Scourge had recognized him. Or was he addressing Duo? No matter. 

“Winner, tell me optimal strike time if you have it,” he bit out, though in final he would rely on his own fighter’s intuition. But if Winner saw a chink in the armor before he did-

“Watch out!” 

Wufei blinked. There’d been-...an odd light. Not a light, no, something that squirmed around the large figure like an inverted halo right before Duo had yelled a warning. Then Wufei’s vision had gone black for a split second. A blink and he could see again, but the Scourge was now a white shape against a dark grey background. The entire world had gone monochrome, the trees were almost black- just the grass clinging to the cliff at their feet was still green.

Duo’s hand had left Wufei’s shoulder. He was holding them up in front of them as if to stop something - he was casting an arcane shield!

“Was that an attack?” Wufei felt utterly cold. “Wasn’t that the spell that he used against the Jishin?!” The light that killed. They’d seen it, if only for a second. Wufei didn’t feel anything wrong, but he glanced in horror at Duo. Duo’s armor was fully out, and utterly black, so he couldn't see if the light was eating it from the inside out or not. 

Duo didn’t look to be in pain, from what Wufei could see of his face through the jagged cutting edges of his armor’s headpiece. “Yeah. Or - I don’t know. I don’t know if it was an attack, but that’s _him_ , that was his energy.”

“Can it be used as a weapon? Can your shield deflect it?”

“Yes and yes,” said Duo in a steely voice. “We have learned well in the past few years. You won’t get us that easily, Maadaku dai Juusan.”

Trusting the Jishin knew what he was doing, Wufei looked back at the Scourge - though for safety’s sake, he let Shenlong curve a half-helm with a filter over his face and eyes. Through it, Juusan was barely visible, though helpfully highlighted by the targeting system’s HUD, along with whatever information Shenlong’s poor techno sensors could make out of that magical morass.

“What is he doing?” Duo ground out.

The non-light still shone through the layers of visual protection, flickering oddly like a signal from a firefly the size of a building. Wufei decided to look away just in case, and when he glanced to one side, Duo had done the same. On Duo’s other side, Heero was-

“Heero!” he hissed, “Don’t look!”

Heero stood with his arms crossed in an extremely stubborn pose, glaring up at the figure through Duo’s arcane shield. 

“Stop wasting time,” he said sharply, making Duo jump at the sudden words. 

“I will not,” Heero added after a pause. “I have a mission. As do you.”

“Er, Heero, who are you talking to?” Duo asked quietly without looking away from Juusan’s general direction.

“Don’t let this distract you,” Wufei muttered, though he had no more idea of what was going on than the Jishin had.

“No more talking,” Heero added. “We are here to fight.”

“Talking? They were _talking?_ ” Duo turned to Wufei to see if the latter shared his confusion.

“VERY WELL.”

Their attention shot back to the Scourge.

The light had stopped shining. A feeling of pressure crept over Wufei. Juusan was looking at him, him and Duo. He knew it in his gut.

“If I could tell you...”

The voice was no longer a blasting boom. It sounded like it was coming from a few feet away. That conversational tone. That patrician accent. It made Wufei’s flesh crawl.

“You are such tiny human fools, in the end.” The voice had fallen to almost a whisper. “I would have taken care of you. For billions of years. But you can never stop pushing.”

The lance rose in Wufei’s HUD. It pointed at them. He tensed, but his gut instinct told him that Juusan had more to say. 

“This time I will cull this galaxy back to pre-sentience, and see if the next species that arises will be more reasonable.”

“Yeah, not if we kick your ass, Juusan.” Duo was fierce defiance beside Wufei. 

“If you… ‘kick my ass’, little maggot… then you will all really regret it.”

Wufei thought he caught an indrawn breath over the comm. 

“Winner? Now?” he muttered.

Silence. But the line was live, Quatre should have heard him.

The light dimmed and the edges of Wufei’s vision blurred. Shenlong flashed alarms into his eye, and next to him, Duo grunted. 

“He’s attacked,” the Jishin ground out.

He was standing with his feet apart, as if braced against a massive force bearing down. But his face, twisted in effort, still held that touch of calm Wufei had seen last night. 

“I got this.” A grin drew a jagged line, splintering the serenity with vicious mirth. “ _We_ got this. Surprised, Immortal? The Jishin are just getting started. We can duck. We can weave.” There was a tremble in the ground under Wufei’s feet. “We can fucking hit back too.”

Wufei’s vision blacked out for a second and he felt weightless. Then the world was back. In that small heartbeat of time, he’d staggered backwards a few steps without feeling it. Heero, for his part, was down on one knee, fist planted in the soft loam; he blinked and then turned to give Duo a dirty look.

“Yuy!” Wufei hissed. “Psychic buffer up. Now!” To defend against the blows Juusan would be sending their way, and to protect them from the battle that had engaged on the arcane plane, separated from the physical by a mere thought. Wouldn’t do to be felled by a stray shot from either side.

Wufei, who’d already deployed Shenlong’s energy wings, was running attack data through the analyzer. There was no fighting honorably against the Scourge, there was only fighting for survival. If Juusan let his attack against Duo distract him-

“Now,” said Winner over the comm. 

Wufei shot off the promontory. Heero was a second behind him, prompted by Quatre’s order. 

Up ahead, Juusan was ridiculously large. As big as an M-class battleship, yet as maneuverable as a regular person, from the way he’d moved until now. Closing in at three hundred meters, Wufei aimed a dragon fang and sent a probing blast up ahead. Juusan ignored it. It impacted and didn’t even leave a scorch mark on the dark armor. The Scourge ignored Wufei too, his attention seemed to be on Heero. 

Perfect. Vaguely insulting, true, but perfect.

Heero hurled himself towards Juusan’s massive helm like a meteor, fist drawing back. Juusan swung the lance towards him. The backwash from such a heavy object moving through air so swiftly set up hurricane winds that buffeted the tiny humans and sent trees crashing down into the dirt a few hundred feet below them.

Juusan was like a wall, like a skyscraper eating up half of Wufei’s world. He got up close and ignited The Glaive.

That got the bastard’s attention. Wufei thought it might.

Juusan moved so fast that Shenlong had to set up new shield and navigational parameters to cope - the kind it would use to deal with combat within a planetar’s atmosphere. Trace elements in the air ignited from energy dispersion, lightning crackled. But the Scourge could not dodge entirely, and The Glaive bit deep into the massive tower of his armor covering his right flank, between the last and second to last rib and over the bottom lobe of the liver (not that anatomy could be counted on, seeing the current scale). 

A second later, Heero connected two hundred meters higher up the giant with a crack like a sonic boom, sending warning parameters flaring from Wing’s onboard computer to Shenlong’s. 

The figure shifted in the air - and was suddenly a kilometer away again. Magic, presumably. Wufei ignored the massive sucking pull of air filling the suddenly empty space where the enemy had been a second before. He focused on cracks and gouges in the previously smooth armor, visible even at this distance.

“Welcome to Center,” he said snidely. He didn’t think Juusan could hear him, but he noted an appreciative snort over the ‘comm. 

“Can you stop him from teleporting like that?” Wufei asked quietly.

“No, sorry.” Duo sounded light-hearted, though Wufei felt pretty sure he was fighting tooth and nail. “But don’t worry-”

“Energy losses can’t be compensated. Mystical plane barred by Duo and the planetary shield. He can only jump like that so many times,” said Quatre in a clipped tone. “Wear him down.”

You knew this wasn’t going to be easy, Wufei interpreted, but you can strike him. You can injure him. If you don’t miss a beat, if you don’t get annihilated, if you keep on hitting him… you can maybe even kill him. 

The gargantuan figure seemed to be staring at them. As Wufei watched, the massive furrow he’d burned into the Scourge’s flank _moved_. It seemed to slip slowly downwards. Wufei blinked- and realized that a section of the armor some fifty meters in diameter had detached itself like a sheet of ice cascading from the side of a gigantic glacier. The piece of dark material tumbled through the air, down, down - it hit the ground with a jarring crash that sent shockwaves all the way to where Wufei was hovering, trees creaking and falling in its wake. 

Wufei caught wisps of dirt cratering up on Juusan’s far side, probably where the helmet Heero had cracked had sloughed off its injuries. 

Wufei had known this battle wasn’t going to be as simple as whaling on the Scourge, and so was not particularly disappointed to see that the deep ravine he’d made in the armor was now a smooth dark undamaged surface once more.

Heero was somewhere to his right. Wufei did not need to look or use Shenlong’s locator to know. He did not need to look or check in with his battle analyzer to know that Heero had finally unclipped the saber from his belt and had ignited it, a small white echo to The Glaive’s brilliant red light.

The giant a few hundred feet away seemed to be contemplating them. An odd number flashed on Shenlong’s HUD. Either the analyzer was getting confused by all the magic in the air - a real possibility, the psychic buffer was screaming alarming data into Wufei’s eye - or else the Scourge had shrunk a good twenty meters.

Massive knuckles the size of spinnets tightened on the lance.

“IT IS TOO EARLY. THERE IS STILL HOPE.”

Wufei didn’t know what to make of that; wasn’t even sure it was addressed to them, it almost felt as if the Scourge was muttering to himself, in a voice that caused trees far and wide to shake, lose branches, and the water to ripple across a nearby lake.

Juusan _moved_ \- bringing up his weapon so fast it caused atmospheric disturbances all the way up to the stratosphere. Ball lightning rolled off his plate armour’s forearm - and then Shenlong’s visor blacked out, in time to save Wufei’s eyes from a light that would have burned out his cornea permanently. The Scourge had fired his lance.

Wufei’s heart stopped. The massive energy discharge had been aimed squarely at Heero, and Wufei knew very well that his strange friend did not do dodging very well. He usually met challenges head on with a ‘what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’ attitude. But even Wing would be vaporized by that strike.

Heero was still alive, though the energy backwash hitting Wing’s shields had sent him tumbling through the air. Wufei registered that, a split second before Juusan had fired, Quatre had said something, it sounded like ‘Move - right’. Thank the stars for Heero’s blind and instantaneous obedience…

Turning his nosedive into a swoop and an attack, Heero’s small but fearless form hurled itself once more at Juusan like a bullet, leaving the Scourge unable to adjust the massive lance’s direction in time. He drew it up to his chest instead. A Dragon lance, like The Glaive, was both a distance and a proximity weapon.

Wufei flowed through air, twisting, trying to make his route unpredictable, mind already on another attack run-

“Finished,” said Winner abruptly - what he was referring to was a mystery. “Heero, attack him from his left. Wufei, fall back two seconds behind Heero and attack his lances.”

Lances? 

Wufei changed his attack vector with a single thought, aiming himself and The Glaive at Juusan’s weapon - his single solitary weapon. He could not start to doubt their tactician now, but he hoped the pressure wasn't getting to Winner. 

Heero dodged and weaved under Quatre’s instructions like an irritating fly, Juusan trying to score at him with the lance. It was angled well, so that a single quick twist could hit Wufei with the massive pommel the size of a small asteroid, in case he took advantage of the distraction and attacked Juusan’s flank again. But since he was attacking the weapon itself-

Wufei let loose a war cry and swung The Glaive. He’d been practicing with it like a fiend these past few weeks, mastering it every moment of the day and night, until he knew it and it knew him. The flame of its spear-head flared out, warbanner-red at the edges, actinic blue at its heart. The monumental lance twisted to defend from the attack Juusan expected against his right side, handing Wufei the target he was really aiming for on a plate. The Glaive sheared through the weapon near the base, slicing through it despite it being a good twenty meters in diameter at that point.

_Smash._

Wufei blinked. Something had- had hit him. Shenlong’s parameters were all in the red. And a bitten-off cry of pain was echoing in his ears. Not his own. Sounded like-

“Duo.” Quatre’s voice was utterly unaffected. “Shunt that energy into the demi-plane of the Broken. Another surge incoming. Wufei, back on your feet. Get the next one.”

Next- what-… Wufei blinked a few times until the world stopped dancing around. 

He wasn’t sure what had happened exactly, but he was fifty meters away from his previous location. Heero was a ball of energy so bright that Shenlong threw up filters to bleed some of the light out; he was between Juusan and Duo’s position, but he’d also been pushed back by the blast - and the brightness reminded Wufei that the Scourge was not the only one who had to worry about energy limitations. 

Juusan had advanced a little towards the promontory where Wufei had left Duo earlier, but he’d drawn up when he’d realized he’d not gotten rid of all the defenders. Super-heated air boiled around the armored figure, the forest below had started to combust, and- 

\- and from the broken hilt of the sheared lance, a new weapon was rebuilding itself in a sizzling fountain of golden light.

Yeah, knew it wasn’t going to be that easy…

“Good,” said Quatre as if reading a digital printout. “Wufei, again.”

“Again? Why- “ Intuition stirred. “He’s using energy? To rebuild-”

Quatre interrupted him with some gobbledygook which was hopefully aimed at Duo (Wufei thought he caught the word chakra) and not himself, as he could not make heads or tails of it. He could make sense of the word ‘again’, though. 

He could also now make sense of the number, oddly fluctuating, that Shenlong kept flashing up. The decreasing size and mass of his target.

“Take out the lances,” Wufei repeated, half to himself and half confirming with Quatre and the others. “Copy.” From the energy output earlier, the attacks from the lance could vaporize any one of them if they didn’t move out of their way. Heero could dodge it if he did not miss a single beat following Quatre’s orders, which was not a gamble they should take at this juncture, while Duo was virtually stationary as he fought his own battle. Keeping Juusan disarmed was crucial.

“The rest too.” Quatre’s words were hard and bitten off.

“The rest…?” Wufei paused on his attack run, while Shenlong polished its vectors.

“You’re the reaction parameter.”

“What?”

Winner made an annoyed tsk sound and then spoke very fast. “You’re the on-the-ground tactician, I can help with the broad outlines but words are not fast enough, I need to help Duo and Heero- Now go!”

Dragons of Wufei’s acquaintance would have said he was rigid and punctilious to a fault, as far from spontaneous as you could get. But that was ignorance speaking, that was knowledge of his outer personality only. Despite his mere twenty three years, Wufei had more battle experience than most elite fighters twice his age. Did it feel like they were using seat-of-the-pants tactics against a might that could murder the galaxy? Yes. But this chequered plan had survived first contact with the enemy with only a few bumps and changes, that automatically made it a plan which the great war lord San-Long would sing paeans of praise for. And Wufei could actually see a winning strategy in all this. Wear down the monster like a pack of lions bearing down a bull elephant, bleeding his strength through multiple attacks and cuts. It could work. It could actually work. Only a truly desperate pack of predators attempted such a feat, and yes, some of them would almost certainly die enabling this plan, but at the end of the day...

This time Juusan tried to drag his lance out of range of Wufei’s strike- but Heero, ably directed by Quatre, plunged in at just the right moment to distract him. Wufei managed to cut the lance down again. 

This time there was no blast of energy from Juusan, but a bolt of black force erupted from the lance’s broken hilt, vaporizing it but picking up Heero and hurling him away in a ball of smoke and crackling dark energy.

Wufei immediately attacked the nearest stretch of Juusan he could reach, cratering a wrist the size of a penitentiary wall. If Heero was dead, they were all doomed anyway, and if he was not, Wufei had to keep the Scourge from capitalizing on the strike.

Blood erupted from the wound- no, not blood! A dark dessicated shape like a skeletal hand burst out perpendicular to the wrist, and tried to snag him. The digits lengthened, gun-metal gray beneath some oozing stretching not-flesh until they ruptured- and bunches of grasping appendages burst out of the breaks to pursue him further.

The Glaive cut again, sure and deadly. Truly, this could have been the moment for which it was forged.

The grasping fingers tumbled towards the ground like chopped wood. Then an arm the size of small building batted at Wufei, who only managed to dodge it by letting himself drop out of the sky like a stone. 

He caught himself a meter from the tree tops, and sped away and around to Juusan’s side, dodging wood and hugging ground. Shenlong’s tracker was keeping abreast of Wing. Heero was still alive and shooting back, and a new lance was forming, so… again. 

And again.

And again.

Wufei did not know what Heero was doing, he had to concentrate too much on his own actions to decrypt Quatre’s orders to his companion. He did not think this monumental monster had vital organs to strike, no glass jaw to hit, no brain to concuss or to pierce. Who knew how they were supposed to actually hurt him or kill him in final? But logic said that if they wore out his energy, well, that could only work in their favor.

Another lance tumbled towards the ground; the ground was littered with them, the treeline (what was left of it) devastated by dark shapes like wrecked ships stranded by a typhoon. Black smoke drifted everywhere. Juusan was only three hundred meters tall now. 

Then things went weird.

Shenlong threw up alarms all over the place and corrected Wufei’s course before the latter could plough himself into the ground. All around him, broken trees were falling straight _up_ like an inverted wooden rain, dirt and debris were everywhere. What- 

Through the fury of moving objects, Wufei caught sight of the nearby lake. It was easy to see, as it appeared to have lifted out of its bed and was floating in the air, an enormous globulous mass. 

He’s messing with gravity, Wufei concluded (in the heat of this mind-shattering battle, the statement made sense, did not raise further questions and came pre-packaged with information on how this might affect his own strategies.)

He had to dodge through a three dimensional puzzle made of broken trees, large pieces of mystical armor, rocks, dirt, water and smears of blood that had probably once been wildlife, but he managed to cut down yet another lance. Juusan was a little over two hundred and fifty meters tall now.

A force hit Wufei like god’s fist, hammering him from the side and sending him ploughing into a morass of debris, world awash with churned water. He threw the lake at me, Wufei concluded, mind still sheared clean of all peripheral concerns. He fired his boosters while Shenlong charted a path out of the mess. Beneath him, a heavy mist swirled through the air as gravity and debris settled back down again. 

“If you knew… you’d beg me to kill you.”

The voice was no longer made of thunder and pressure, it was now like a man talking on the world’s largest bullhorn. Loud beyond belief, but no longer so overwhelming. Wufei felt a flash of vindictive pride that they’d affected the monster this far. He barely paid the words any attention. He had no interest in what the Scourge had to say.

“You are about to unleash something far beyond your comprehension.”

Whatever.

On the comm, muted as the traffic was not directed at him, he could hear arcane mumbo jumbo from Quatre, spoken at top speed, and Duo’s occasional grunt or interjection. The magical battle must match the physical one, by the sound of it. Other comm signals were filtered out by Shenlong on a need-to-know basis, just data flashing through the visor on occasion. Their troops in the sky were also locked in battle.

But then one message cut through all the filters. 

“The Libra! It’s diving! Suicide run on the Sanctuary!”

Shit!

Wufei twisted The Glaive and hurled a massive fireball at the lance fifty meters away, melting the tip, then landed hard on the ground in an automatic care for his energy reserves. He paid no mind to the mud and mulch that immediately engulfed him up to his knees. His mind ran through their defenses above their heads. They did not have the kind of armament that could stop a ship of that class! Not in time!

“Howard! Torgue! You-”

“I got this,” Torgue said shortly. 

How- Torgue was aboard their only Deiran-class cruiser, it could take on much, but not the Libra. 

Wufei’s eyes widened as his on-board computer showed him the new vectors of Torgue’s ship, and he understood. 

But if that was what it took…

“Go in glory, Torgue.”

“Yessir.” 

“Howard,” Wufei bit off, “get your Sweepers and those civilians who are helping you to ready tractor beams. Deflect any pieces of the Libra that might fall towards the Sanctuary. It must not take a direct hit.”

“Pieces? What pieces?! How are we- oh my god!”

Wufei cut Howard off and pinged Vali. 

There was a series of bounces and rerouting that told him he’d lost his third in command as well. 

A voice he did not know picked up. “Um, yeah?”

The lack of proper call sign indicated this was most likely a Sweeper, not a Dragon. “Situation?”

“Um, um, the Libra- something blew up in its engines, it’s breaking up- “

“I know, but the rest of Juusan’s fleet?”

“I don’t know, sir, I’m helming the Pariat, we’ve got all these mages aboard - they’re locking down the mentats that work for the Scourge-”

A signal cut in. “Wufei.” 

Only Trowa could sound so utterly calm in the midst of a battle that was shaking the planet.

“Concentrate on Juusan. I’ll handle this.”

Trowa knew less about space battles than Wufei knew about ley lines. But the shaman knew people, he knew and had worked with most of the ones above their heads at any rate, and he could see the greater picture. Quatre could help too in a pinch. 

“Corzo, put Barton onto the main comms and help him with call routing and the on-board analyzer,” Wufei ordered shortly, then fired up Shenlong’s wings again and took off like a rocket.

Juusan was a hundred and sixteen meters tall, and now Heero’s blows actually looked like they were reaching him, pushing him back. Wing’s energy reserves were still acceptable, and Heero himself did not appear too damaged. Wufei was bruised and bleeding from being buffeted around by the flak, but he was still functional. 

It was Duo he was worried about. Quatre was still helping him with the tactics on the arcane side, but now Duo sounded like he was talking through gritted teeth. And odd light kept blooming off objets, glinting off wet wood in improbable ways, or shining off of Shenlong’s invisible wings. 

But they were still holding their own. They still had a chance.

“You small, small humans. Your limited minds cannot grasp what you are doing.” The Scourge still sounded calm - then again, chances were good that this giant didn’t actually have lungs with which to get winded, he was a construct of magic and the mind. “Your lives are motes, specks of dust, and for their sake you are risking everything. There are no words in any of your tongues for this foolishness.”

It’d be too much to hope that he’ll start begging, Wufei thought with an internal snort.

“Wufei,” Quatre said suddenly. Adrenaline shot through Wufei’s system. Winner’s voice rang with tension for the first time since the battle started.

“Reaching confluence,” Quatre bit out. “Be ready.”

Wufei had no idea what a confluence was, but ‘ready’, that, he understood. 

Something was changing, he could feel it in his gut. And not just Juusan’s size. He was no longer calling up lances, his hands shaped dark energy into whips instead. He seemed to move faster now, and with more deadly intent, concentrating on Heero but edging the latter towards where Duo was standing - on what used to be a promontory, but was now a shallow crater. Wufei was still getting an A-OK signal from Duo’s piece of scale, though, so the Jishin had survived whatever had flattened his previous position. 

And then-

Was it a mistake on Heero’s part? Or the fruition of a strategy the Scourge had been formulating all along?

The dark energy he was using whipped out and finally caught Heero full on. And the battle arena exploded. Eighteen kilotons of force, Shenlong estimated as it pulled an emergency landing and covered Wufei with as strong an energy shield as it could manage, shaped to resist wind pull.

The air turned black with ash, pulped wood, dirt, smoke and steam. His HUD showed him on a grid the blip that was Heero - still alive, miraculously, but hurled a good three kilometers away. 

“WU-”

Wufei did not need orders from Quatre. He knew. He took the shortest route straight towards the ground he’d stood on earlier, alongside his two friends. He ignored the pummeling from falling objects that hit him, concentrating all his energy into getting into position. Three seconds later, he scored ground, sending up a geyser of dirt that almost reached Duo, still standing strong, though the way his hands were raised, his head bowed and his back bent, he seemed to be carrying the world on his shoulders.

Straightening up, Wufei turned to face the enemy.

The tactic was obvious. Somehow - Wufei hadn’t been following all that carefully - Heero had resisted blows that would have pummeled the moon into oblivion. It must be obvious the Scourge could not hammer him down in the present conditions, and his force’s attack on the Sanctuary and the planetary shield had failed. But taking Heero out of the fight for a few precious seconds would let Juusan take out his essential support. If Duo were no longer wrestling him to a standstill on the arcane plane, he’d have the full scope of his magic back at his command. He’d either have the power to annihilate them all right away, or if not, then he’d definitely win the battle of endurance. 

The figure - only sixty meters tall now - hovered a way off. A lance formed itself once more in his hand, but he did not level it. He seemed to be staring down at the two small humans before him, the helm a blank surface hiding all expression, if there was even a face beneath it at all.

This was it, Wufei realized.

This was where he and Duo were going to die together. 

Wufei grinned as he rose in the air, throwing all his reserves and every ounce of his burning desire for justice into the ring. His lifespan was now measured in seconds, and it mattered not a whit. Victory or defeat hinged on how long he could make his death last, how glorious his fall. And when he was gone, Duo would have his turn before joining him, and then they would both be at peace at last.

In the distance, a dark figure ripped out of the forest canopy like a cork out of a bottle. Heero must have dug himself out of the crater he’d been pounded into, and he was racing back. Which mean that for Juusan, it was now or never.

The air around the Scourge warped. He seemed to expand, and then shrink even further - only twenty five meters tall now, but the way his armor glimmered spoke of power. He tilted himself forward and plunged towards Wufei.

Without fear, the Dragon shot towards his foe.

 

\---

 

Next Chapter: Dirge For Those Who Did Not Die

Things go off plan for pretty much everybody. Or so it is to be hoped, because some plans involved here are worse than others...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is this a horrible place to leave it? Yes, yes it is (sorry) However, next chapter will be out next Sunday, as it’s virtually ready as is and two weeks of this cliffhanger would be cruel and unusual.


	47. Dirge For Those Who Did Not Die

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A day early, as I'm super busy tomorrow. Plus it was virtually all written, I was mainly putting off posting it out of sheer sadism (and lack of time, more accurately, but sadism works too :P )

As he shot towards the large figure like a bullet, Wufei was ready for anything.

Or so he thought. 

But he was not ready for what happened next.

The enemy’s lance did not fire, did not swing at him. The free hand remained empty of magic. The glimmer in the air merely twinkled harmlessly. And Juusan did not make a single move to defend himself as The Glaive slammed right through his chest.

A stunned second gave way to internal cursing. This was a trick, had to be, there were surely no actual organs in that large body that-

...that was beginning to crack and break apart like a shell…

Wufei was motionless, The Glaive clutched in both hands, staring at the figure pinned by his weapon in mid air.

The armor frittered and broke away in chunks that drifted to dust before they’d fallen more than a few feet. Beneath it, the shape of a man, his usual size, speared through the chest. A familiar face, those spiked eyebrows, the patrician features, the cool superior expression.

“Well struck.... Wufei…”

Wufei swallowed. His mind was one large blank, while his reflexes were still geared, ready for any trap. But he wasn’t sure this was one.

In the far distance, out of the corner of his eye, Wufei saw that Heero had stopped dead as if he’d hit a wall. Then he slowly started to sink down, down towards the blasted remains of the forest.

“My… friend… I wish I could tell you… “ There was no hint of pain in the voice, but it was fainter. The last of the armor had fallen away, leaving only the familiar uniform. No blood pouring from the injury, no smoke from The Glaive’s fire - but his whole form was flickering now. 

“If I could tell you… but this is not my role, and that is my one limitation. The only thing I can give you… is a warning. You’re all in terrible danger. You’ve destroyed the status quo, and now all of life, the universe itself, will be under attack by something beyond your comprehension, beyond-... you have merely minutes - an hour at most if he needs to recover- you must- “

A spasm crossed his being, a flicker as if a movie had skipped a few frames. Then Juusan smiled.

“Good luck, Dragon. You will all need it.” It was as if he focused at the end, and he looked almost human for a brief instant. “It goes counter to the scope of my very existence, yet... I rather hope… you will survive…”

The Glaive sparked hungrily- its victim flared up like a magnesium flash and was gone.

At much the same time, Shenlong, who’d been displaying warnings about energy reserves for over a minute now, abruptly cut out all thrusters as its analyzers confirmed the absence of an immediate threat. Wufei tumbled out of the sky, barley controlling his fall at the last second and hitting the ground in a crouch, hard.

He stared blindly at surface he’d landed on, it looked like the raw exudate that paper was made of.

“...What-... is he-...”

“He was checkmated,” said Quatre in a matter of fact voice.

It took a few seconds for Wufei to make sense of that. “... But why did he not _try_ -...”

“He saw that ultimately, he couldn’t win. It’s as if… that was his purpose. To lose. And what he had to tell you was more important than a few more minutes of fighting at the end of an existence spanning eons. The status quo. All life. The universe itself. What is supposed to happen in less than an hour…?” Quatre’s mutter sounded distracted. 

“He is dead, right?” Wufei asked, and then the words rang around his head like the gongs of a bell. 

“...Huh? Oh yes. Yes. He’s dead, he...” The cold tone of Zero-Quatre was breaking up, like a cloud parting to let the sunshine through. “He _is_ dead. We- we won. Trowa, we won! We’re all alive!”

“Good, good,” said Trowa over the comm. “Hey, Corzo, can you land over there?”

“Sure thing.”

“Oh, drop me off at Wufei’s position first, I think he’s hurt,” Quatre interjected. 

“I’m okay,” Wufei said automatically, which was an exaggeration, but mainly meant he wasn’t dying. “How’s the situation up there?”

“Up where?” Quatre asked, still sounding dazed and distracted. 

Trowa cut in again. “It’s under control. I’m sorry, Wufei, Torgue…”

“I know,” 

“But the libra has been destroyed. And the rest of the Scourge’s troops are disorganized, or running away.”

“Good.” Wufei sank to his knees into wood mulch and churned loam, bowed his head and stopped thinking for a few minutes. 

 

\---

 

“There you go,” Quatre murmured.

Wufei blinked and came back to himself. 

“Hm, I’m fine,” he lied with a grunt, trying rather ineffectually to push away the hand sending healing energy towards some injury or other. “Thanks, but save your magic, Heero might need it more- have you seen Duo?” He’d been between Duo and Juusan. The latter hadn’t gotten past him, so surely Duo was unharmed.

“Duo’s over there, stirring. He’s not a happy camper, but he’ll be okay. I need to go to him before he panics.”

“Panics?” There was a hole in Winner’s declaration. “Wait, what about Heero?”

Quatre paused in the act of getting to his feet, and glanced over his shoulder. “Um, he’s alive.”

Shenlong immediately reached out and connected to Wing’s onboard computer. “He’s fine; heart rate, blood pressure- fuck, it’s like he’s been on a vacation.” By contrast, Wufei’s bruises had bruises, and he’d rarely been this exhausted in his life.

”...Right. Erm, Trowa’s with him.”

“Why?”

Quatre looked a little concerned. “He’s probably okay. It’s just that he’s sitting on a rock again- look, later, I need to go help Duo. Can you make your way to where Heero and Trowa are?”

Wufei found himself asking irritated questions to empty air. His head was still ringing. The bells of victory! Hah! _They had won!_ But… what did Winner mean when he said Duo might panic? Duo had stared death in the face, he was the bringer of death and a million deaths incarnate, he didn’t do panicky, especially now they’d won. 

Wufei didn’t even look around to see where Heero and Trowa might be, he limped after Quatre.

The healer was walking quickly, almost running now. A man could panic if he lost a limb. Or- 

Wufei felt cold as he saw a dark figure up ahead. On his knees, reaching out, groping, then grabbing his head. Blinded...?

Shenlong flashed a bright red “Are you insane?!” number at him as he dredged out the very, very last dregs of his extra reserves and used a flight boost to jump ahead and reach Duo just as the healer got to his knees at his side.

Duo’s blue eyes were wide and unblinking. He was moving his head from side to side, cupping his ears with one hand then the other. Wufei felt cold. 

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Duo? Duo! It’s okay!” Quatre said loudly, ignoring Wufei. “It’s only temporary!”

“ _What_ is only temporary, Winner?!” Wufei roared.

Duo jumped an inch and blinked. “Fuck, I can hear Wufei yelling!” he shouted, still staring around unseeing. “How can I hear him?! I can’t hear- am I alive?“

“You’re neither dead nor brain dead,” Quatre said with fake exasperation, deep joy and relief burning beneath it. “Your arcane spirit took a massive blow. You’re mystically deafened for awhile, but it won’t last, see?” One hand stayed on Duo’s head, while the other gestured before his eyes as if drawing patterns in the air. Presumably it made sense to magic users because Duo blinked and seemed stunned. “It’s not permanently damaged, Duo, don’t worry. You won’t be able to cast magic for a few hours. As a healer, I’d recommend a day or two. That feeling of deafness is your body reacting to the shunt of your chakras and the closure of your dreamsong channel.”

“But… but I can’t hear-...”

Quatre’s smile faded a bit, became sympathetic. “Yes, I know. The blockage has cut off your mystical link to the Halls of the Dead.”

Duo stared at him mutely.

“Your life tree will heal,” Quatre said softly. “But if the contact has been cut… I don’t know enough about the Jishin Soul Mind to be sure, but I don’t know if it can re-establish itself. It might, after the pathways heal. But if it doesn’t… then maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Your Soul Mind was so jumbled and damaged, it was doing you more harm than good. Even if you can reintegrate it, well… maybe you should consider not doing so. It would be infinitely better for your mental health. Juusan is defeated, you no longer need to stretch yourself on a rack.”

“Huh?” said Duo after a full ten seconds. Wufei was pretty sure he’d not understood one word out of four of Winner’s explanation. 

Quatre must have drawn the same conclusion, he patted Duo briskly on the shoulder and spoke loudly. “Never mind. You’ll be better soon, okay? That’s what matters.”

Duo stared at him, then at Wufei, then at Winner again.

“He’s _dead?_ ”

“Yes.”

“Is… is the planet about to blow up?”

Quatre blinked. “What? No.”

“But-...”

“But your stupid mirror was a piece of junk, as I told you,” Wufei snapped, crossing his arms over his chest and glaring.

Quatre looked from one to the other, clearly puzzled. “Heh? What mirror?”

Wufei snorted, rubbing his aching right shoulder. “That stupid Jishin mirror that was supposed to predict our death if our reflection appears in it.”

Quatre’s jaw sagged. “What mirror?!”

Wufei stared at him, diffuse irritation bubbling inside. “Why are you surprised? You said it worked that way!”

“Me?! What are you talking about?”

“That mirror aboard the Cabalist man o’ war! You said-... “ 

“That arcane device? Uh, no, I didn’t say that, did I? Not specifically a death mirror. Why was it a _death_ mirror?”

“It said so! Above it on the frame! The words you were looking at! You said it worked as advertised!” But now that he thought of it, that was all Quatre had said, he hadn’t actually confirmed- 

“I can’t read Jishin.” Quatre, still puzzled, shrugged. “I was just looking at the functionality on the arcane level. It was supposed to be an advanced warning system initially. Now that I think about it, it probably did show the lines of people who were about to die, or at least it did originally. But then it seems to have gotten hotwired by some mage at some point, pretty crudely. When I examined it, it was just able to give broad probability outlines of the past, present and near future of anyone reflected - a crystal ball of sorts. And just about as reliable. Sure, it worked, but it did not provide any insights you couldn’t figure out yourself with a bit of self-reflection and foresight, when all was said and done. Zero could dance rings around it if it cared to use that kind of interface.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?! Svale mentioned ‘death and disaster’!”

Quatre rubbed his temple, looking vague. “Did she? I didn’t think… I miss out on small details like that if I’m not paying attention.”

Wufei stared at him, speechless. 

Quatre patted Duo - who looked even more stunned - on the shoulder gently, almost absently. “Why did you think it was a death mirror? I mean, didn’t you wonder why everyone appeared in it?” His gaze sharpened as he glanced at one then the other again. “Wow, were you guys being really pessimistic, thinking we were all going to die? Have you been carrying this around all these months?”

Wufei was glaring at a broken, soggy stump of tree. In truth, his grumpiness was a shell around a tired, empty feeling the size of a small moon. They had won… they had survived… the murderer had been punished, Meilan and Wufei’s people had been awarded justice… but he’d been expecting to die at the apogee of his revenge. Hoping, really, if he was honest with himself; he’d found a strange comfort in knowing he’d not live out a half-life as the last remaining High Dragon. Was that why he’d let himself believe the mirror’s prediction, even as a part of him realized it was most likely bogus…? Why else would he have so easily swallowed-

“...Heero,” said Duo in a barely-there whisper.

Oh and that. “Right,” Wufei said briskly, overcoming some of his strange vague a l’ame. “First off, it did sort of show us getting beat up-” Wufei decided to not go too deeply into what had been shown. “And neither Svale nor Heero showed up in it, so we presumed that he won, even if the rest of us perished.”

He focused away from the destroyed forest around them, to look at Winner. 

Who was pinning him with a look colder than a meat-locker in a morgue.

“What?” Quatre asked in a flat, somehow dangerous voice, the Zero voice. 

Wufei found his mouth a bit dry. “Heero’s reflection didn’t appear in the mirror. Neither did Svale’s.” Winner’s back had been turned by the time Svale had shown up, he remembered. 

“You didn’t. See. Heero.”

“...No. I-”

Quatre turned on his heels and started walking off to the north, in the direction he’d said Heero had landed.

Wufei watched him leave and then shook his head. Sure, the strategies had been key in defeating the Scourge, but on a personal level, the benefits vs. inconvenience of that Zero system were not quite adding up in his head. 

The Jishin was still on his knees in rubble. Suited him. Wufei flipped open a full HUD and started making tallies of men lost, after doing a soft reboot of Shenlong and starting on energy replenishing and repairs. Torgue and Vali were gone in glory. So were half a dozen other Dragons at first count, most lost when Torgue’s ship had detonated itself in the Libra’s engines. The Sweepers were still recovering jettisoned escape pods from the Deiran-class cruiser, Torgue had only kept essential flight personnel and forced the others off the doomed ship, to go and find a fight they could actually contribute to. 

“Open comm channels,” he told Corzo. “Do they know we’ve won yet?”

“Yessir. Told them when the blond bit stopped talking weird and said it was okay. Plus it was pretty obvious, what with Juusan disintegrating on _your lance_ , sir.” Corzo’s voice was jubilant. “They’ll talk of this day until the galaxy dies.”

“Plenty of glory all around.”

“Yessir. Well, ‘xcept for me. I just flew those two civvies around. Not much to sing about.”

“Corzo, can you remind me who flew a light spinnet less than a click away from the greatest power in the galaxy when he was an estimated five hundred meters tall, and held it steady for our strategist?”

“Um… that’d be me, sir.”

“If anyone tells you you can’t sing, send them to me.”

“Yessir.” He could almost hear the grin in Corzo’s tone.

Shenlong bleeped a few results at him. Wufei checked once more on Heero’s stats - still fine - then glanced down.

Duo was on his knees with his hands on them in an oddly formal position, head down.

“You ever standing up again, Jishin?”

Duo nodded once, slowly. Seemed a mite sarcastic, for such a small movement. He’s obviously recuperating, thought Wufei, flipping off the HUD. 

“Come on, get over it. Your stupid mirror made a mistake, as a piece of arcane crap can be expected to.”

“Yeah. Sure motivated you, though.”

Wufei had half turned to follow Winner, but stopped. “Huh?”

“Motivated. You. Also helped seduce you into a roll in the sheets, if I’m not mistaken.”

Wufei felt his jaw sag.

Duo slowly looked up. His face was a mask painted with a jagged smile. His eyes were like pits. 

“I know how Dragons are wired together. A promise of death fighting your enemy was the biggest morale boost you could get. Am I right? Helped you focus on the immediate. I didn’t want you distracted by thoughts of what might happen afterwards.”

“What are you-...” saying...?

Duo stared at him almost hungrily. He had yet to blink. It was like someone else was moving his mouth - but his head was empty now. 

“Did you like the bit about the kids?”

He did _not_ just say that. They did not talk about that- they didn’t even _think_ about that. 

Wufei’s temper ignited into a slow burn and his fists clenched.

“I thought that was inspired myself.” Duo slowly got to his feet and straightened in stages. “Well, now he’s dead, and I can drop all pretenses. And the manipulation - man, I’ve had to let people ream me before to get them to jump through my hoops, but can I just say, you Dragons are a bit on the rough side. Comes from being primitive brutes. Easy to pull your strings, though, even without my Mark of control. I use any means necessary and I needed you to fight the Scourge, like I said from the start - can’t believe you forgot that. But I got you to fight for a Jishin, so it was all worth it, right?” 

Wufei stared at him, stunned, for three long seconds - then his fist shot forward, aimed right at the bastard.

For a split second Duo’s face had that breath of calm again like last night-

Until he was propulsed backwards by a mere shove rather than a punch. It sent him sprawling quite harmlessly in the muck. 

The look on his face was priceless, and Wufei had ransomed entire planets with his clan, he should know.

“What the _fuck_ -“ Duo scrambled to his feet. Wufei waited until just the right moment and sent him sprawling again with a kick to the shoulder that was more of a nudge.

Duo landed with an _Oof_ and a wince of pain, then stared up at him, gaping.

Wufei looked down at him clinically. “You done?”

“What- what-... are you deaf? Didn’t you hear what I just told you?!”

“What, that long string of generalities, disjointed statements and vague truths twisted around to sound like a suggestion that you manipulated me these last months? Yeah, I heard you. I also heard you loud and clear back on the Cabalist’s ship when I asked you straight out if you had anything to do with what that mirror showed me, and you said No on that oath of yours. Sorry, Jishin, despite what you think of us primitive Dragons, I have both a brain and a memory. And I’ve gotten very good at spotting your evasions. Or did you think it was a coincidence that I could pin you down nine times out of ten into a definite yes-or-no answer all these months?”

The look Duo gave him was reminiscent of a small animal caught in the headlights of an oncoming battleship. 

Wufei made a ‘come on’ gesture with the fingers of the hand he hadn’t stuck irritably on his hip. “Fine. Let’s have it. If at any point you manipulated me in the past months, other than with your Mark, tell me now, straight out.”

Duo still stared. His mouth was open but nothing stupid was coming out, which was a marked improvement. 

“Point made. So what the fuck are you trying to do, you sick idiot?” We just won, we’re still miraculously alive, why do Jishin have to make things so bloody hard and complicated?! 

The complicated idiot folded himself up into an aching heap sitting on the ground, his eyes on the dirt again. 

“...I promised you my death, didn’t I. Months ago, after I took the Mark off. You said that after _he_ was dead, my life was yours. Just trying to make it easy for you.”

Wufei’s eyebrow arched. “Really. How about that. Everybody seems to be using me as their favorite method of suicide today.” 

Duo didn’t say anything, but actually flinched as if the words had been the terminal blow he’d been expecting. One that Wufei was not going to deliver. Suicide was not a shame for a Dragon; for the sick, the dying, the dishonored trying to atone; for those whose losses could no longer be fought, to which category Duo could definitely be said to belong. It was a personal decision, and Wufei would force himself to respect it (even though they had just _WON_ ), but he was thrice damned if he would _help_ kill his- his- this annoying Jishin. 

“No dice, Duo,” he sneered. “You want to die, do the honors yourself.”

“I… Why? What about your revenge?”

“You never killed anyone I was attached to, you merely had me crawling in the dirt like a dog. Now I get to see you do the same,” Wufei pointed out, tilting his chin to indicate the mud. “That’s revenge enough.”

“You...”

Silence. Around them, dust settled into the mulched wood that’d once been a forest. A large piece of the Scourge’s armor, as big as a house, was ploughed deep into the ground a dozen meters away, smoking a little and smelling like ozone and burnt tin.

Duo finally stirred and glared at Wufei’s boots. “So what, you’re going to stay and watch me?”

“What, you’re going to do it now?” Wufei promptly sneered back. “Are you planning on throwing yourself on Juusan’s pyre? We’ll have to set the forest alight first. It got a lake dumped on it, might take awhile, otherwise you’ll end up pleasantly smoked rather than cremated.”

He finally caught a glimpse of Duo’s face. It looked tired, sad, almost puzzled. “I… Surviving has become one of my bad habit over these last few years. I appear to have become rather addicted to it,” he said in a low voice.

“So go on living,” Wufei growled. “I’m good either way, it’s the self-pity that’s getting to me here.”

“...I can’t seem to do that either. How do you do it, Fei?”

“What, living?”

“Yeah. Can you really walk away from… this?” His gaze was sweeping the decimated forest, huge shards of black armor dotting the smoldering steaming landscape here and there like the gravestones of fallen giants rising through the mist. “I don’t know, I know you’re tough, so maybe I’m just projecting, but I can’t see you running off to try to recreate your race from whatever pitiful remains there are out there…”

“If that was a question, it was the answer as well,” Wufei said indifferently.

“If that’s not your plan... why do you keep sucking air?”

“Honor, and the knowledge of right and wrong.”

“...I’m sure that made sense to you when you said it.”

“I’m not sure you’d understand, Maxwell. I have a moral compass and you have a sink of ineptitude”

The return of their usual patter brought with it a flicker of a smile. As if Wufei’s insults were Duo’s oxygen. “Why thanks, Wuffers.”

“But by taking out Jusan, we might have upset some cosmic balance that was keeping something in check. If our actions, however justified, put mankind at-”

“Wait-wait- what?! You believe the Scourge?” Duo was finally looking straight at him with eyes almost round with amazement. 

“He has never outright lied to me.”

“You know, you guys had the weirdest relationship...”

“I’m sure you’re the expert in that,” Wufei muttered. “Be that as it may, I will consider it my duty to ensure that my revenge has not compromised something much larger than my race.”

Duo looked at him with annoyance and a spark of envy. “And that’s enough?”

“Yes,” Wufei answered firmly, burying the faint hesitancy that had tried to creep in.

A flash of light caught his attention; contrails peppered the sky to the southeast. The Libra, falling to earth. Shenlong flashed a few nuggets of data into Wufei’s vision.

“The sweepers have caught most of the big pieces and are neutralizing those that could cause a risk to population centers,” he informed Duo. “We’re not about to get squashed by a piece of Juusan’s ship, if that was your last hope. Now, I need to go see how Heero is doing. You figure out how to cope with the tragedy of having defeated the greatest threat to mankind and the murderer of your people. Show up soon if you want the Anstra to take you back. Otherwise you’re teleporting, or you can walk a good long ways.”

Wufei turned and walked off. He’d said all he had to say, all he could. It was not right to interfere in the ultimate decision of a fellow warrior, or an idiotic perplexing magic-slinging Jishin either. He’d said all that honor and the Dragon code dictated he should say - and really, the bloody Trickster was surely too tenacious to opt for an easy way out. 

A fifteen minute trudge through a blasted landscape, alternatively soaked, burning, cratered, vitrified or potholed, got Wufei to where Heero was, indeed, sitting on a rock. Quatre was standing next to him, looking at him in a weird way. Trowa was crouched at his side, trying to catch and hold Heero’s gaze, speaking softly.

Heero did not respond to the shaman, but he twitched and then looked up slowly in Wufei’s direction. For a brief instant - so very brief - there was a flicker of emotion in those eyes. Almost like...pain, as if Wufei was a ghost haunting him. 

That look made Wufei kneel quickly on Heero’s other side and grab his comrade’s shoulder. “Hey, Yuy. Snap out of it. We won.”

But the eyes were once more steely hard and focused on… something else. Something in a distance none of his friends could see. It did not appear to make him happy, but Heero’s attention was entirely focused on it anyway.

Trowa leaned forward, fastened his hand on Heero’s wrist. “Heero?”

Once more, the minutest flinch, body language more than anything, a brief flash of pain. No other indication that Heero had even noticed the touch. 

Wufei almost felt like pinching himself. They _had_ survived, right? Why was Heero acting like all his friends had died in combat?

Trowa stood up and pulled Heero gently to his feet. “Come on, let’s go home,” he said softly.

“Parameter 3247,” said Quatre, still staring at Heero. 

Wufei stared at him, then glanced quizzically at Trowa. The man who’d become his friend over board games, battle plans and long nights of not talking was trying to keep up his stoic facade, but Wufei could glimpse behind it now. 

“I guess he’s recalculating,” Trowa said, voice husky. He cleared his throat. “I’m not sure what he’s working on now, but Juusan’s death will have wrenched every line in the galaxy into new shapes.”

“Right.”

Trowa led Heero by the hand. Quatre eventually walked after them like a sleepwalker, unblinking eyes fastened on Heero’s back. Wufei watched them both with concern, then marched on ahead, checking there were no sinkholes or radiation in their way. 

It took them a good long time to make their way to a space outside of the battlefield where the Anstra had been able to land. Duo was leaning against one of the shuttle’s landing pylons, staring at nothing. The pain in the ass was still alive. I knew it, thought Wufei with an internal sniff, too tired to mine his thoughts on the matter any deeper.

… Ten minutes ago, Shenlong’s timer had emitted a discreet _beep_ ; an hour since the Scourge had died. Had those last words been a mind game? Didn’t seem like Juusan’s style. 

“All lines I can see are tranquil.” Trowa was speaking mainly to himself as he glanced around. His gaze flinched off of Quatre. Then he focused on a couple of birds flying by, squawking in confusion. “Center is perfectly calm.” 

Wufei made a vague ‘hmf’ sound. Nobody else commented.

“...At least we won,” Trowa said as if coming to a final conclusion after a long argument.

“Yes! Thank you!” Wufei snapped, throwing up his hands. “Maybe we should celebrate with a song. A quick dirge, perhaps? A lament?”

“We’re all shell-shocked,” Trowa said reasonably. “But if it makes you feel better, Svale was whooping over the ship’s comm a few minutes ago, saying something about a party. It seems we need to stop in the town of Trachane on the way home, and buy a lot of booze.”

“Joy.”

 

\---

Next Chapter: Iwa No Hone

The best kind of vacation spot in which to relax after a difficult battle. Complete with huge forests, deadly fauna and flora, and a whole bunch of unfriendly dead natives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Duo might seem a bit OOC in this, versus canon or even versus his attitude in other parts of the fic, but remember he’s got a lot going on upstairs, and he was counting on dying in this fight even more than Wufei was. He’s off balance and lost. We’ll see the fallout of all this next chapter, out in two weeks.


	48. Iwa No Hone

Wufei scrambled over the barrier of rocks instead of vaulting over it or simply flying in. He wouldn’t admit to himself that the unusual amount of effort it took to climb over into the hidden canyon was due to his reluctance at what he might find there. Duo might not even be here, but this was his spot, and he’d been gone for hours, disappearing almost as soon as the victory revels had started.

The Jishin was there. And alive. But the little hideaway was cleared out in a way Wufei did not like. The bedding was rolled, the bags packed. Duo and Imp were sitting on his gathered belongings, looking into the heart of the pool. They appeared to be waiting for something.

Duo’s shoulders relaxed a bit as Wufei approached. Apparently, Wufei’s presence - and, though he’d deny it, the tacit admission that he did care enough to look for Duo - visibly meant something to him.

“What the hell are you hiding out here for?” Wufei grunted, glancing around.

“I’m waiting for the moon to rise.” Duo was still staring at the stone pool of clear water.

“...Why?” Wufei didn’t like the sound of that. It had a sound of finality, like someone waiting for a last dawn before throwing himself from a cliff.

“By that time, Svale will be plastered," came the much more prosaic reply, "and I can use the Sanctuary’s portal to gate to Iwa no Hone without that old bag sticking her oar in. Fortunately it was created for emergency evacuations, powered by the Source beneath it, so I don’t need to use my own power. I’m still bushed.”

Wufei looked sharply at Duo in surprise. Duo continued to stare into the clear water.

“You want to go back? Why?” For how long? Forever? Wufei crossed his arms over his chest severely and bit back on that question. “Juusan destroyed it. There’s nothing left.” Nothing for the living…

“He destroyed the population, not the planet. Iwa no Hone is intact. There’s a place I need to go to. It’s a sacred spot for us; the physical place where the Halls were started, and which still contains the Soul Mind.”

“I thought you’d gotten rid of them and good riddance.” Wufei rather wished he hadn’t said that last almost immediately, but Duo didn’t look perturbed.

“Yes, it’s nice to be alone in my head.” Wufei wondered if he’d imagined the dull dip of ‘alone’ in the otherwise measured and calm words. “But everything happened so fast… we were all so centered on Juusan for so long, and then they were gone. I… never got to-... I needed to… there were things I wanted to say, wanted to hear.”

Such as ‘thanks, Duo, for single-handedly wreaking revenge against the most powerful creature in the galaxy’? Yeah, that would have been nice, Wufei thought sourly. From the little he knew of them, the collective Trickster ghosts had not been keen on positive reinforcement.

He was surprised and reluctantly impressed by the young Jishin. Gone was the desperate man who’d tried to get Wufei to execute him. Duo was calm, focused, merely looking for one last contact with his race, one last chance to get their approval and mourn before he could move on. Understandable, one must suppose. Wufei, for his part, had not required sackcloth and ashes, he’d burned his mourning on the pyre of revenge. But he was a little impressed by Duo’s visible recovery from an abyss greater than any Wufei had ever faced. That demanded a modicum of respect. If Duo had to mourn and get closure after Juusan's defeat, an honorable ally shouldn't leave him to-... damn.

Wufei turned it around in his mind for a few seconds - already knowing without a doubt what he would do, but looking for, well, the right angle.

“Come on, then,” he said briskly.

Duo finally looked at him in surprise. “Huh?”

“Who cares if Svale pokes her nose in. Just tell her to go to hell. She can’t stop us, so might as well leave right away.”

“Whoa.” Duo stared at him. “Us? Who’s us?”

“I assume you weren’t planning on setting up house on a dead planet afterwards?”

“No,” Duo replied, a bit uncertainly but, of course, truthfully.

“So this is just a day trip. In that case, I'm coming with you. I’ve always wanted to see the planet of bones.”

Duo stared at him as if Wufei had grown two heads and they were trying to vocalize in harmony.

“Errr… but… Fei, that place is dangerous-“

“Why else do you think I want to go? Do I look like the type that goes to the beach?”

Duo stared at him for a long moment. Normally so quick-witted and vital, this sluggish, quiet, hesitant Jishin was unsettling. Wufei told himself to enjoy it while he could, because he was sure the mercurial bastard would be back on his feet way too soon for a grumpy Dragon’s taste.

“Okay, I guess,” Duo finally said.

“Fine. I have your word it’s a two-way trip, right?”

“Oh yes, the portal goes both ways. We won’t end up exiled on Iwa no Hone. That would be very un-fun. Though strangely romantic, in a way.” The mocking grin had returned, though it was a watered down version. “But using the gate to return from Iwa No Hone takes power. It usually feeds off our collective, but now that the others are dead and I’m drained... it’s not going to be a day trip, is what I’m saying, more a week-long honeymoon. Five days at best. I’ll be slingshotting us halfway across the left arm of the galaxy, after all.”

Wufei hadn’t needed the minor jibe to make him reconsider. A whole week with the Jishin? On _his_ planet? And what about the situation here?

Juusan _was_ dead, every mage, crone and Warden around confirmed it, and his odd deadline had come and gone hours ago without the slightest seismic tremor or arcane portent that anybody could see. As for the ‘situation’...Heero was sitting on a brand new rock, Quatre was walking in circles muttering to himself, Trowa was following him like a lost puppy and Svale was drunk and pinching the buttocks of anyone under the age of one hundred, male and female. Several irate Dragons and a couple of Sweepers had already realized she was invulnerable, and a few were discussing ways of stress-testing this phenomenon.

“Let’s get going already.” Wufei would drop a line to a couple of Dragons, so someone could rip Ether and come get him if they didn’t hear from him in a week. Beyond that, the planet of bones was sounding like a better deal than Center was right now. At least all its annoying population was dead.

\---

Iwa No Hone had a semi-arid climate overall, its single continent rife with chains of mountains and large pine, cedar and sequoia forests, up to rock-strewn polar tundras to the north which had been the only place a spaceship could land back in the day. But this particular bit of the planet near the equator was a jungle. Wufei gave the leystones behind him a nervous look, expecting the vines to choke and crack them right in front of his eyes. Obviously the thing worked, since they’d made it here after the longest, most uncomfortable teleport to date, which was quite a challenge. Wufei was fighting nausea, which wasn’t helped by the humid organic stink emitted by the jungle around them. The humid air was rife with screeches, rustles, hoots and insect chirrs, part and parcel of the hot sun that baked the dense tangle of trees around them, wafting scents of green growing things and brown rotting ones in equal measure. Wufei wrinkled his nose. He really preferred spaceships.

Duo was crouched off to one side, staring down at something buried in creepers that had invaded the teleportation platform. Imp was sitting on his forearm, strangely quiescent.

Wufei rubbed his neck and breathed through his mouth. “You going to vomit over there? I thought you liked teleportation,” he tossed over his shoulder.

Duo didn’t say anything.

Wufei glanced around- a memory tugged, from that distant time back in the Vision chamber, when he’d last seen this place through Duo’s recollections. It hadn’t been overgrown back then, but it was the same portal from which young Duo had left his home planet. Wufei looked around more slowly, judging positions against that memory, then he approached Duo without any more jibes.

“Is that…”

Duo was looking down at the heap of vegetation. There was virtually nothing to see; a few juts of what could be sticks as much as anything else.

“Yeah. It’s Solo,” he said, voice quiet.

Wufei looked around. The gate was on a rise amongst the jungle, and the entire base was made out of stones, which had given the creepers and vines a run for their money. But presumably there was earth further down. “Do you wish to give him funeral rites?”

Duo looked up and squinted at him quizzically. “...What?”

“Do you wish to bury him? Or do Jishin cremate?”

“What, bodies? We leave ‘em where they fall - unless it was another place than Iwa No Hone. We bring the corpse back here in that case, put it in his tower. The dead guy will usually tell his descendants through the Soul Mind what books and research and gewgaws they’re allowed to take from his stuff, then the place is locked up and nature takes it over again.”

“....Really?” Wufei was trying not to kick a man kneeling in front of the corpse of his only relative, but Dragons cremated their dead, or buried them at space, shooting them off into the sun in missile casings after keeping them in the confines of a sterile morgue or mortuary. Where did the Jishin get off calling Dragons primitive?

Duo did a whole-body shrug that lifted him out of his crouch. “Come on.”

Wufei almost asked, “Are you sure,” but Duo would know best. “Where is this Hall of yours?”

“Not too far from here. It’s easier if I teleport us though.”

“Didn’t Winner tell you to go easy on the magic? Recoup your energy for the trip back. If it’s not far, we can walk,” said Wufei, whose victory dinner was still doing slow roils.

Duo snorted. “In this? You never been in a jungle before.”

“I usually fly over this kind of terrain. Or napalm it if the enemy is hiding there.”

“Oh right, forgot who I was talking to for a minute. Fine, if you’re up to it, we can do this pedestrian style. Just try not to burn my home to the ground.”

  


\---  


The trip took half a day, Center-time (Iwa No Hone’s days were 34% longer). Wufei didn’t mind the delay, since they were stuck here for awhile anyway, and it wasn’t as if they actually had to walk, they both had the ability to leap from treetop to towering treetop.

Not that the trip was uneventful. The Elsire had not had a city per se, the Tricksters had never tamed their planet. On occasion Wufei spotted a tower rising above the jungle, being overtaken by vegetation, but there were no roads between these solitary dwellings, no shops, no towns, no means of transport other than teleportation. Instead it was just acre after acre of forest, interrupted by mesas and short mountain chains, rearing up as if the vindictive planet had punched its way through the canopy. The jungle was alive. Insects the size of their heads floated among the treetops, feasting on fruit and dead things. Huge creatures slithered, crept, hooted or thrashed through the branches lower down, and occasionally made a bid on the two travellers. A critter with eight legs and a sleek spotted hide hurled itself up from the tree covering like it’d been catapulted, forty feet over their heads and then the large flat body acted like a parasail as it aimed at them, wicked claws gleaming like multiple swords at the ready. Duo paralyzed it with a gesture and let it crash down through the trees without a comment.

An hour later, as they were passing by a tree taller than the rest, the trunk unexpectedly whipped towards them, the ‘leaves’ quivering scillia at the end of a grasping brown tentacle. The creature - Plant? Animal? - tried to grab them in passing. No head or organs were visible. Wufei’s dragon fang hesitated, not knowing where to shoot it.

“Just ignore it,” Duo said from somewhere up ahead. Wufei made a detour and caught up with a jet of his thrusters, wondering why the Tricksters let such things lurk in their backyard. It was begging for an accident. What if someone’s teleport flunked out and left them stranded in this madness? Granted, all this activity made the trip less boring, and in addition, something like a flying saurian made of wood and moss exploded out of a tree trunk and ate the Imp, so it wasn’t all bad. Duo wasted time getting the pesky creature out of the predator’s gullet before letting them continue on their way.

His planet’s bloody-minded and murderous resilience seemed to please Duo, in an attenuated way; all his emotions were banked when compared to the usual animal. Wufei, taking his cue from that muted attitude, didn’t make snide comments about Jishin living conditions, though stars only knew there were plenty to make.

A hill so perfectly shaped like a saddle that it couldn’t possibly be natural, however huge it was, rose a few dozen meters above the treeline. There was a structure built in the dip at the center, though it took Wufei a few moments to identify it as definitely man-made; it looked like a castle had been assaulted by a craggy hillock. It towered over the jungle around it. Dark holes punched into the sides - too large for windows, surely, but way too high to be doors - seemed to stare out blankly at the surrounding landscape.

Duo leaped down to the stone skirting that surrounded it. Wufei followed- but veered sharply and almost landed in a heap as he realized he’d been about to crush a mound of dry bones scattered about.

There’d been quite a lot of Jishin gathered here when Juusan had-... Wufei looked around, mind blank of anything to say, even unsure what to feel, just automatically tallying skulls (the rest of the bodies had been pulled apart by predators, and scattered about.) Duo for his part didn't even glance down as he made his way towards a large yawning entrance, doorless and dark, and paused there.  
“This is the Hall of the Dead.” Duo’s voice sounded dull. He kicked a boot against the ground.

Wufei looked up. There were decorations on the outside of the building, he now realized; shapes and whorls made of stone. Not carved or inset, more as if the planet itself had decided to fingerpaint its granite with streaks of mica and quartz, slate and feldspar. The scenes showed Tricksters doing… something. It wasn’t a tapestry of battles and victories, as Wufei would have expected; the scenes showed Jishin standing around while odd shapes bloomed between them. The depictions weren’t clear to someone who did not share their origin and mythology. Maybe it was celebration of some of their greater magics?

“You can just go in there and talk to them?” Wufei asked, shelving any other questions. They were not here for a travelogue or his curiosity, after all. Duo had a mission.

“Maybe.”

Wufei stared at Duo’s profile. “Maybe? We just came halfway across the galaxy for a _maybe_ ?”

“No, I can talk to them. Almost certainly. But there’s formalities, rituals.” Duo was staring up at a complicated mosaic of a Trickster either building or deconstructing a strange tentacled monster the size of a building, depicted in natural, unpolished malachite. “I’m not really part of the Soul Mind. Even before my link got severed, I was more hag-ridden than part of the whole. I’m...still a kid in their eyes. I never went through the Eneaad Abar, the induction ritual. I was going to as soon as Imp was completed. I think I need to go through that in order to address them.”

“What’s required?”

“A family member to stand at my side, for a start. Oh, wait, they’re all dead,” Duo snarked without a change in his expression. “So I guess a- um, an ally will do.”

“What would you have done if I’d been rational and stayed home?” Wufei asked, swatting at another mosquito the size of an energy cartridge that was trying to eat him.

“Not sure. Didn’t think that far.” He was still staring at the malachite monstrosity above their heads.

“What else is required for this ritual?”

Duo’s gaze turned inwards. “The candidate stands up, states his name and makes his declaration. That’s a lil’ speech that presents the coming of age project, followed by abject groveling to celebrate the ancestors who helped. Stuff like that. That’s all I remember, I only ever saw it done once. Our species did not have many kids.”

“Well let’s go then.”

“...Yeah. Let’s go,” said Duo, finally moving as if he’d received a small push.

Wufei followed him through an entrance a spinnet could have taxied through. The halls were huge inside, echoing footsteps bouncing off white marble, pillars of rock like bone, barely muffled by huge green and brown banners, either woven or even possibly grown from vegetation. It was completely and utterly empty, to Wufei’s surprise, just this huge reverberating space. He hadn’t known what to expect, but he’d expected _something_ .

“What- oof!”

Wufei staggered back. The Halls only looked empty; there was certainly something there, though. Something immense and powerful. It felt like... pressure. It felt a bit like Juusan again. Only instead of one diamond hard intent, it was made of a million eyes, a million disapproving looks in his direction.

He’d grabbed The Glaive instinctively and had it in hand. That didn’t win him any fans either.

“Yeah, shoulda seen that coming. Sorry, Wufei. They, um, don’t like your species at the best of times, and I’m not supposed to bring a foreigner here.” Duo’s voice was fading in and out. “Maybe wait outside.”

Wufei triggered the psychic buffer, cleared his head with a shake and gave the air around them a pugnacious look. “Get on with it.”

“You sure? Well… okay.”

Duo perched a cowed Imp on his shoulder and went to stand on one side of the large space. Wufei realized that grooves and etchings in the floor were drawing out complex symbols. Spells written in stone, probably; he’d seen something like this in the Sanctuary, though on a considerably smaller scale. Duo was at the center of a circle, three meters in diameter, rising a bare inch above the ground. In the otherwise large flat space, the small elevation was like a podium. He folded his hands together, clasped his fingers, held them before his chest almost like a prayer.

The attention of the presence around them left Wufei, somewhat reluctantly. The focus of the Soul Mind turned to its last scion.

There was a rustle like a million indrawn breaths. Sort of. It seemed to echo from within Wufei’s brain, completely bypassing all those useless auditory nerves. Gah, magic, Wufei thought, reflexively poking his ear for all the good that did.

**I**

That was all. Just ‘I’.

The words filtered through the psychic buffer - it was more thought than word, and Wufei’s brain was transforming the signal into a word. The pronoun was… it translated as ‘I’ but it was an ‘I’ repeated billions of times by every Jishin that had ever lived since the first transference of souls, melded into one. It was an ‘I’ so big that Wufei staggered and nearly fell. It was an ‘I’ that automatically became a ‘we’, if only out of sheer weight. Fuck, Wufei thought, dazed. No wonder the Jishin never bothered with gods. They are their own.

The Halls still seemed empty. But the dappled sunlight danced on the rocks and floated on the dust beams in a way that did not seem entirely natural.

 **I** ****  
**Am** **  
** **Here**

The echoes rustled and crept around, and then seemed to solidify, like the pressure was one step away from taking form. The voice was still godlike, but now seemed more focused.

**Why are you standing before me?**

“I am Duo, of the house of Maxwell,” said Duo, still in his formal pose though his tone didn’t seem to take the proceedings nearly so seriously. “I am standing before you today as an adult. I’ve completed my quest. It was originally to build a familiar. Then it turned out that beating the immortal aspect of primordial power was a little more pressing than turning in my homework, so we’ll say it was that. You guys were there, you saw I did an okay job. Sure taught me a lot about magic and kicking ass. So here is what I have to say, my heartfelt words to my kith and kin and all my dead ancestors.”

Wufei crossed his arms. At least this was going to be short.

In the moment of silence that followed, Imp suddenly bounced away from its master’s shoulder, flew once around Duo’s head and then shot off without any apparent hesitation towards Wufei. It circled him once, then Wufei felt a small weight hit his back and something scrabble and grab his nice clean tunic. Wufei almost spun around- a useless gesture - and opened his mouth to tell Duo to call back his stupid pet rock.

Duo opened his eyes, looked out into the open Halls.

“I… hate… you…”

Wufei froze in the motion of reaching over his shoulder and looked back at Duo.

_“I hate you!”_

It was a primal scream that shattered the dead echoes lurking in the Halls.

“We were so big! So great! We were the Jishin! And you curled up and died long before the Scourge even got here!”

A wind that wasn’t one whipped around Wufei. It seemed the ancestors were not pleased. He found himself readying The Glaive.

“We were once explorers and dreamers! Makers and destroyers! We created the greatest arcane wonders of all the ages! Then we got old and sat in our towers and talked about how great we were instead of- of _being_ great! Juusan came and plucked us like a fucking daisy! And you all just rolled over and played dead without even trying to fight it!”

There was no words directly in response- but Duo’s head reared as if the objection had been voiced.

“ _Don’t give me that! I fought it!_ I beat it! And then I carried you - carried you _all!_ I became the instrument of our revenge, I let you - I _encouraged_ you to hound me and torment me and drive me further and further, do- do some really horrid shit. I… I hate you… and sometimes I hate myself.”

Silence.

Wufei’s mouth was as dry as the bones outside. The Glaive’s handle was making little creaking noises in his grip.

The presence made of a million dead stared down at their last descendant.

“I just had to tell you now that it’s over.” Duo’s hands were no longer in their formal pose, and no longer clenched into fists, they dangled heavily at his side, his neck bowed as he stared blindly at some intricate carving on the floor. “We were all broken. I hope we can heal now. We gotta. I don’t have to cut up my soul and sell it in pieces for revenge anymore. I don’t want to hate myself anymore and I don’t want to hate you either. So I just had to say it once, and now I guess, well, we gotta go on, right?”

**No.**

Duo blinked and looked up as if there was something there he could see. “Huh?”

 **We do not ‘go on’** we are gone

Duo looked confused. “Yeah, that’s a given, but I’m still alive, I have to keep on sucking oxygen or-”

 **You were supposed to die** join us.

Wufei blinked and rubbed his ear. There was-... the Voice were no longer massively single-minded. He’d heard some kind of echo. His mind was still hearing one meaning - and his ears were hearing nothing at all other than the sound of dust falling in a mausoleum. But on some plane, he could almost feel the thread of different flavors of thought that made up the whole. The Soul Mind was not one entity, it still had all the personalities of its components.

“Well… yeah, I know that bringing down Juusan at the cost of my own life was kind of the plan - kind of a certainty, pretty much.” Duo was rubbing the back of his neck, uncertain. “But turns out Juusan couldn’t cut the mustard in the end. Or me. So…”

**And is this what you want?**

There were echoes of faint care and concern in the question, but mainly enough scorn to cut like a knife. Duo flinched as if he’d been physically struck.

“What?”

 **You’re broken inside, boy** child, our child. **You’ve scrabbled in the dirt for six years** long years, **it was necessary but now it must cease** you can’t go on.

Duo’s mouth moved soundlessly and then he laughed, a cutting sound. “Yeah. Right. I see your point. And you’re quite right. Of course. Because thanks to you and Juusan, I’m hollow inside. I’m broken. I don’t know how to live without ghosts or an enemy it seems.”

 **Yes** yes.

“Awesome,” Duo muttered, looking away so Wufei could no longer see his expression even in profile. “You guys don’t care.”

 **We care that our legacy remains preserved** you need to set it down. **The last of the Jishin will not eke out a miserable life in some back hole of the galaxy** time to rest.

“But -” Duo rubbed his face as if scrubbing away something he did not want to feel. “But it’s not ended. Juusan is dead, yeah, but it sounds like there could be more danger out there.”

The blast of scorn didn’t make sense to Wufei in words, but its meaning was clear as it made him stagger.

Duo stood unmoved. “Yeah, I know whatever scary thing he mentioned didn’t happen - and it’s the Scourge himself who told us, but- no, actually, that’s the whole point! First off, an immortal Power like him has a loose concept of time even when he’s paying attention. Pinned on The Glaive like a butterfly, Juusan might have said an hour and meant a year. More to the point the Scourge can be considered a fucking reliable source of info because he didn’t have the- the mental flexibility for mind games. If he says we’re fucked, we should be getting ready to fight, not lying down to take it.”

**No.**

“Huh?”

 **We have taken the Scourge with us into death** through you. **We have left at our apogee. We will not remain nailed to this existence.**

“Well, hooray for us, but what about the rest of the galaxy?” Duo’s gaze flitted towards Wufei.

**No.**

“....Just No?!”

 **You owe them nothing** they should be respecting your wishes. **Our race is dead. You will join us here** and no longer be alone. **We will not linger on as pale shades. It is done.**

“But... but I can’t do that!” Duo scrubbed his chesnut mop frantically. “Are you guys even listening to me? Quatre - the Zero bearer - he’s acting weird, and-”

**NO.**

The small humans in the room staggered. Imp had crawled up Wufei’s back to look over his shoulder, but it now slid back down and grabbed onto the back of his belt, cowering.

 **We are not your pitiful humans to negotiate and bargain with. This is your choice, Duo Maxwell. You can join us now or forever be alone** you shouldn’t have to be alone anymore.

“But - but-” then Duo fell silent and stared helplessly at the silent Halls.  
A banner swayed in a breeze, brushing stone beneath it with a dry rasp. A bird outside screeched. There was a pause and then what felt like a very final pronouncement.

 **This is our decision. We will not accept your rite. We will not allow you to connect to us. You will join us now in death or not at all** join us, let us rest together.

“That is _it!!_ ”

The dead silence of the hall was broken by a very loud bellow and the mechanical whirring noise of Shenlong deploying.

“I am not listening to this anymore!” Wufei could not remember the last time he felt this furious. Even when Juusan had murdered his race, the Power hadn’t pretended to be smugly superior about it. “He’s done all this and now you’re kicking him out?!”

The Halls’ attention centered briefly on him. **Leave, Dragon.**

“Or what?! Come at me! The last thing in this or any other dimension I will fear is some fucking dead cowards!” The words bounced around stone and pillars a lot and seemed to set up an angry chorus of shouts.

“Um, Wu...” Duo sounded a bit worried.

The collective Jishin were now staring at him. Wufei really didn’t give a shit.

“Fine! You want to all curl up and _die?!_ I won’t be plugging in life support! But you leave him alone! He’s choosing to go on fighting, which will honor you more than you can ever comprehend. But you don’t want him?? That’s _perfect!_ I’ll have him then!”

“Er?” said Duo, staring at Wufei as the latter marched up to him and thumped him once on each shoulder, twice on the chest, then grabbed him by the back of the neck and pulled him into the embrace which was the Dragon’s only rite in accepting worthy recruits, no kowtowing or scraping required.

\- the kiss wasn’t part of the ritual, wasn’t planned, was too hard and quick and bruising really, and Wufei had no idea where that’d come from right then, but it was bound to irritated every true-blue Jishin ever born and that was a good enough reason, no need for further introspection.

He kept the hand on Duo’s neck, stiff in shock, and turned to glare at empty space.

“You don’t want him in your clan, I’ll take him as part of mine. He’s more than proved himself. I hope you think of that in your dead eons to come and _burn_ with it. Come on, Duo, we’re leaving.” Wufei dropped his grip to Duo’s wrist and dragged him off the podium and towards the entrance.

Duo staggered a few steps involuntarily before digging his heels in.

“W-wait- what-”

“Do you want to join them?” Wufei spun around without letting go. “I’m only asking for the form, because I know you, Duo Maxwell, and deep inside you’re as hardy as a cockroach.”

“Uh...” The slackjawed expression shredded into a crazy and very familiar grin Wufei hadn’t seen for over a day now. “Wow, that’s the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me.”

“Staying or leaving?”

“Oh, leaving. So leaving. Let’s blow this mausoleum, shall we?” Imp chose that moment to leave Wufei’s back with a whir of tiny wings and settle back on Duo’s shoulder, where it started waving its fist at the dead monument around them for a change.

Wufei stomped towards the sunshine shining outside - but the feeling of a presence between them and the exit made him fall into a defensive crouch and bring up Shenlong’s shields and buffer. The Jishin wanted a fight of it?! Bring it! The Glaive sprang out of its sheath, seething with his anger. If he blew the Halls sky-high, those bloody ghosts would probably be gone too - or if not then he’d try something else!

Duo freed his wrist with a tug and reached out to… something. It looked like a few golden motes of dust playing in sunshine. But as Duo held out his hand, Wufei thought he caught a glimpse, as if the motes, the light, the geometry of the Halls behind them, had all come together to form the outlines of a face for a brief flash. The face of a man he remembered from a vision.

“Are you sure?” Duo’s voice was soft. Then he smiled. “Yeah, of course you are. The Maxwell stubbornness rises to the fore. Of course you can join me, Solo. I only ever really came back here for you.”

The sunbeam drifted, and disappeared where it touched Duo’s armor. Wufei thought he saw a little flicker of blue light shimmer the darkness.

A faint whisper blew against his cheek. There were a few more specks of dappled light, filtering through the green of trees right outside, or reflecting red off The Glaive’s fire. One of the latter drifted near him, and Wufei knew who that was without having to guess/glimpse a face. Wufei’s expression was still set in an aggressive scowl… which seemed to amuse the presence there. Wufei felt a faint hint of approval too. Whether it was for finishing Juusan and bringing honor to The Glaive, or for supporting Duo, he did not know. The light drifted over, caused a little red flare in Duo’s armor and was gone, along with a few other wisps. Probably not more than a dozen or two. Wufei thought he caught a few grins of wicked amusement in that half-there-half-not glimpse of faces.

“We good?” Wufei asked, leaning against The Glaive.

“Yup.”

“Then take the few who still want to fight rather than curl up in defeat, and let’s get out of here.”

“Aaaah, it’s not that simple.”

Wufei looked back with a frown. ”Why?”

Duo glanced over his shoulder at the hall. The expression on his face was the grin of Shi No Kami, all teeth and wicked amusement. “They want to help me, and ride shotgun in my brain, but it’s not like they’re hitching a ride out of here; they’re staying in the Halls, where they will always be. But they’ve accepted me. They’re connecting me back to the Soul Mind. And that gives me access to the rest. All the rest, like the Jishin always have, a font of knowledge for me to use in my fights to come, until the day I go down swinging. Saddle up, you stuck up old mummies. You’re in for the same crazy ride as the rest of us. Maybe it’ll freshen you up a bit, blow out the cobwebs. Come on, Wu, let’s make tracks.”

  


\---

Wufei scanned the area outside the Halls automatically, then turned towards Duo with one of many questions on his lips.

The look on Duo’s face kept him silent. Duo was staring out at the landscape around them with eyes almost completely round. He took a few steps, blindly, spun slowly on himself, looked in amazement at the malachite monstrosity over the arch to the Halls as if he’d not seen it before. Then he walked off to one side, looked at the jungle, then fell into a loose crouch to examine a strange looking mushroom larger than his torso as if it was the most extraordinary thing he’d ever seen.

“What is it?” Wufei asked, and had to repeat himself a couple of times before Duo’s attention left the vegetation enough to answer.

“...It’s...It’s working like it should now. I can _see_ -...They had never fully integrated before, I had to work to- to- to use the knowledge properly. Now it’s just… flowing.” He seemed to hardly be paying attention to his own words as he straightened and started looking out over the horizon again, eyes gluing themselves to spots that Wufei could not distinguish from others.

“Everything I see is like- like a book that just needs to be opened, and a flick of- of attention can show me-...man, no words, sorry, magic thing. It’s just-“

He blinked and glanced over his shoulder at the small beep behind him.

Wufei tapped Shenlong’s helm, its UID lancing down over his eye and sparkling with light. “We call it Enriched Overlay in my culture. The visual nerve impulses tell the onboard database when I want to retrieve more information about something I am looking at and it scrolls it directly into my optic center.”

Duo looked briefly miffed that Wufei already knew and enjoyed this shiny new perk, and had better description for it, then his expression melted into amusement at his own reaction. He looked...lighter. As if a tremendous weight had rolled off his shoulders.

“Yeah, yeah, you got shiny techno toys,” he drawled, looking around again. “I’m ready to bet we gave you the idea for it in the first place, though.”

“Hardly, this technology existed before the Scattering. As did a lot of things that you magic users recreated out of necessity once the Scourge smashed the sub-spatial transport planes the old ships used.”

“We didn’t just ‘recreate’, I mean, teleportation? Hello? It takes weeks to rip Ether to get anywhere, if not months or years-”

“Yes, but at least spaceships can transport more than a dozen people at a time.”

It was an automatic resumption of their long running magic versus tech argument, but neither man’s attention was really into what they were saying. Duo was still staring around as if the entire universe had lost a hardened coat of black veneer and was all shiny and new for him.

“So I guess you’re still a Jishin,” Wufei said slowly, looking around as well, though his database didn’t have anywhere near the amount of information to overlay that Duo would have access to, this being the Elsire planet and all.

“Yeah. More than ever before, really, I’m a full Jishin now. It’s all working properly. It’s…” Then Duo looked like he’d taken a hit from a rubber mallet. His eyes started darting around the clearing.

“That’s good,” Wufei said simply. “For a Dragon, there is nothing worse than exile from one’s clan.”

“That’s not… um...”

The air between them was fresh and rich with jungle scents and a manifold negotiation happening without words.

Wufei realized they were standing fifteen feet apart and giving each other the side-eye like two ninnies. Of for the love of- “Duo-“

“They did officially kick me out. It’s not like they kept me, more like I created my own faction.” Duo said it quickly, then appeared to be listening to his own words and find them exactly correct. “Hah. That’s right! A breakaway sect, that’s us.”

“Duo, you don’t-“

“Master Duo is right,” Imp piped up, nodding to Wufei in a superior way, “we break things all the time.”

“Like the pebble says. So, ah, anyway.” Duo was still staring out at the landscape but Wufei doubted he was dredging up any more information about it. “Even if they hadn’t tossed me out on my ear, I’m- I’m more than that now. I might be more a Jishin than ever before, but I’ve grown past that. I’m part of our gang back on Center, part of the galaxy, part of the fight against Juusan and whatever other big bad is following him. If I was a Jishin-“

“You can stop-“

”-I’d be bunging myself up in a tower right about now, but there’s no way in hell that’s happening, I-“

“Welcome to my clan,” Wufei managed to get in sideways.

That caused a moment’s silence, at last.

“I suppose you will take that with you?” Wufei jutted a chin at Imp.

Duo’s gaze stopped bouncing around the hilltop, the Halls and the trees to squint at the homunculus on his shoulder. “Well, yeah, it’s part of me.”

“I guess it will come too then. As your pet. Or possibly a grindstone.”

Imp boggled at him. Then it stuck out its tongue and crossed its eyes. Wufei had a feeling most of this had gone over its head and this was a fall-back position. Fair enough.

Duo caught it and cupped it in his hands, slipped it into its carrying pocket with more attention than normally required. He was looking, strangely, almost embarrassed. “I- er-... Right. Thanks. Um, the fact that I’m a magic user isn’t a massive problem?”

Wufei shrugged. “We just established that magic and technology are parallel for many things. And can sometimes intersect successfully. You wear a mecha comm unit, and I bear The Glaive. The main thing is that you’re a tenacious fighter, and you do have a sense of right and wrong buried deep inside that soul - perhaps more than you needed these past years. That oath you took should make up for any deviousness still lurking there.”

“It’s fighting smart rather than fighting stupid- never mind. But won’t your fellow dragons kick up a row?”

“My fellow dragons...?” Wufei tipped up his head to stare at the blue and cloudy white arch above. Strange to see a sky without a planetary shield, he’d gotten used to the magical sheen of colors and its promise of safety. “At this point, maybe I am a bit more as well… I feel more akin to you, to Heero, to Quatre and Trowa, than my fellow Dragons. Some have proven themselves worthy in their battle against Juusan’s forces, so I might consider… well, that is for the future. What are you twittering about?” There’d been muttering at his side for the past ten seconds.

“I’m not twittering, I’m trying it out,” Duo said, his mobile face twisting in contemplation. “Hmm. We are all a bit more. We need a new name. Hmm, Duo Maxwell, last of the Jishin, and first of the Jishin-Ryu, how does that sound?”

“Premature,” Wufei said with a dry snort of amusement. “Before you go remaking both our species, how about we get back to Center first? Has your reintegration to the Soul Mind helped with your energy reserves?”

“Ah, no. I mean, yes, I gotta lot of power in the tank now, and I can tap into more if I need to through my links to the Soul Mind, but my mystical channels, yikes, feels like the Scourge took a cheese grater to ‘em. I might be able to do it in a pinch, but I might just as well smear us across the Milky Way because I got a spasm at the wrong time. I’m gonna need a few days, like the doctor ordered. Guess we’re stuck here awhile… Oh, yeah. Um, say, Wufei, after we beat Juusan, I kinda was having a bit of an off day, like, I said some really stupid shit, um-”

“Why are you always talking?”

“It’s what I do. Besides, I’m trying to apologize, this is a once in a lifetime occasion, you should probably enjoy it. I’m also, ah, this is a bit hard, I know I’m, well, a piece of work, got stuff at the back of my head still - besides the crew - so I can see where you’ll probably decide-”

“Yes, yes,” Wufei sighed, striding towards him. “Fortunately I love a challenge.”

This time the kiss wasn’t quite so forceful or quick.

“Okay. Just as long as that’s understood-” Duo said and Wufei interrupted him again. Best way to gag a Jishin, apparently. Well, this one at least.

Something squirmed between them. They were squishing the Imp. Bonus, as far as Wufei was concerned.

“Finally quiet?” he asked when their lips parted.

“Oh, in no way, but I can think of better things to do with my mouth right this minute,” Duo whispered wickedly.

“Later. The day’s not half done and we only have a week at most. Come on, show me the planet of bones.”

Duo blinked. “Show you?”

“There’s got to be more to it than this crypt.”

“Yeah, there is.”

“Well come on then. Was that tower you grew up in somewhere around here? And I wanted to see the observatory. I never got an idea of its size from the reconnaissance pics or your memories. In a few hours, we can plan a place to camp tonight.” The mocking ‘week-long honeymoon’ phrase Duo had employed a couple of hours and another planet ago was waltzing around Wufei’s head like an annoying gnat he couldn’t swat away. But later. He was going to see if he could persuade Duo to take Solo’s remains back to their tower. It just seemed more respectful, more tidy, even if the man himself was now cruising around in Duo’s head and probably didn’t care.

“Okay.” Duo’s pleased smile was strangely mature, almost normal. Wufei wondered if this was the new Duo, then told himself that there was probably going to be a new Duo every single day. He was that kind of critter.  
A far back memory of a perpetually angry and rather stuck-up elitist High Dragon was trying to tell Wufei this thing he was embarking on was insane, distasteful and just plain wrong. Wufei told that last spark of the past to shut up. Sure, it was probably going to be loaded with weirdness and difficulties, but it was definitely not going to be boring. Wufei had a future again, might as well fill it with things that were interesting and challenging in equal measure.

\---

Next chapter: The Tipping Point

Enjoy that honemoon, boys, things may not be quite as copacetic when you get back home.


	49. The Tipping Point

Trowa looked up from the map laid out on the wooden picnic table, as he felt lines at the heart of the Sanctuary surge and crawl about in a very unnatural way.

“Oh, _finally!_ ” Svale snapped, turning towards the central cirque.

“Your Lord Chang is back,” Trowa told the Dragon who’d been hovering around all day, checking his timepiece and circling the cirque. “Tell those other idiots to call off their rescue trip to Iwa No Hone and get their ships ready for in-atmosphere flights.”

“I don’t take orders from you, magic-slinger,” the Dragon said, trudging towards the cirque where the air was twinkling and slowly ripping apart under the effect of a long distance teleport.

“He’ll have you in the air in ten minutes,” Trowa predicted without lifting his head away from the map he was scrutinizing again.

“You’re back! Had a good holiday?” Svale sneered at the two figures approaching them from the portal gate.

“Yeah, it was okay,” Duo drawled. A few feet to his left, Wufei was reassuring the Dragon that he was fine and that ‘the Jishin’ hadn’t hurt him, and by the way, where was everyone, he had an announcement.

Trowa glanced up as he reached for the ruler. The two of them were walking a few feet apart as if they’d accidentally run into each other just now. It was both obviously deliberate and equally obviously artificial. Trowa would have been amused by the pretence a week ago. He would have also wondered why they bothered. Even someone who couldn’t read lines could figure out the change in their relationship just by looking at them for five seconds.

“Hey Tro- rock and ashes, man, you look like shit.”

“I know.” Trowa tapped his communicator. “Sweeper 7?”

“Still no sign, sir," came the message over the comm.

“Are you done with your sector?”

“In five minutes.”

“Good. Start the next sector right away, and call me when you're finished. Howard can refuel you in Trevinka.”

"Acknowledged."

“What’s going on?” Wufei asked, walking around the table and examining the map.

Trowa took a breath-

Wufei’s eyes widened in shock as he stared over Trowa’s shoulder.

Trowa reluctantly turned to follow the Dragon’s gaze. He knew what the man had seen. He’d heard the door to the compound open and light footsteps heading towards them.

Behind Trowa, Duo swore brokenly in a tongue now dead.

“Finally!” Quatre marched up to Duo, eyes fixed and blazing. “You have them back. I see it. Good. Mobilize them. Bring Zero’s creators online. We need to make a daisy-chain of- do you know how to connect our minds? Duo? Come on! Every minute counts!”

Duo didn’t react when Quatre grabbed him by the lapels of his black jacket and shook him. Tried to shake him. Quatre hadn’t slept in a week and only ate when Trowa harassed him. He’d barely be able to shake a child at this point.

“Quatre...what...”

“Duo!” Quatre tried to shake him again as if he’d made a pertinent argument and Duo was simply being obtuse. “No time! We’re on the edge of the abyss! We made things worse, not better! Now the marbles are at risk! We need to bring balance before it’s too late! It’s- program eight abort, program one hundred and ten, start, schematic for link, bring up,” Quatre said, talking in one long breathless mumble, to all appearances addressing Imp on Duo’s shoulder. Imp stared at Quatre’s worn face, so white it looked like alabaster, other than the dark rings around his unblinking eyes. The stone familiar made a small ‘meep’ sound and went to hide in Duo’s backpack.

“Since when is it this bad?” Wufei asked Trowa softly. He’d leaned hard knuckles on the table, eyes darting over the map, over Quatre’s wan face and fever-bright eyes, over his thin wrists, over Svale’s somber countenance. He looked like a general about to give orders to move entire armies. Trowa felt a vague easing of the tension knotting his stomach. Chang could help. He was a solid man.

“He was alright at first, but then when Heero disappeared, he-“

“What?”

”-saw something, he panicked, he triggered some sort of program-” and he’d been like that ever since.

“Heero what?!” Duo gasped. Wufei just waited for him to elaborate.

“Shortly after you left. He just walked out of the Sanctuary at dawn the next day before anyone was awake. A crow saw him heading out over the moor. I tracked him as far as the river Reg. He appears to have plunged right in. The river is still acting up, it’s a raging torrent, I could not pick up his trail anywhere on the other side.”

“Yes. That’s when I knew,” Quatre said quickly. He always talked in these rapid half bitten off words these days, and what he said assumed you heard the ninety nine percent of the conversation that was only happening somewhere in his head. “He’s the one and only. Find him. But even if we do. And then there’s the marbles. The Source of All Things.” Quatre must have suddenly had one of his sudden surges of adrenaline because he actually managed to give Duo a shake that made the latter’s teeth click. “The Source of all Things!”

“If he went into that river…” Wufei stared down at the map. “Are we sure he’s even alive?”

“Hah!” Quatre sneered, giving Wufei a glare that had sent the other Dragons around Sanctuary haring for cover before now. “If only he were dead. We’d be okay then.”

“Quatre!” Duo gasped, appalled.

“But he’s not, he killed Juusan, and parameter 3412.”

”...What?”

“I blame myself. I missed it.” Quatre’s voice had slowed. He was staring at his hands knotted in Duo’s leather jacket. “I didn’t ask you about the mirror. It wasn’t your fault, you didn’t see what I saw. I should have seen it. Now we’re going to lose it all if we can’t stop it. Probability 4.241% and falling. Duo.”

“Y-yes?”

“You need to remember this.” Quatre stared at him as if drilling him with his eyes. “It could come down to this, to you blocking him. Trowa and Wufei might be able to reach him, but you will have to block him first. Remember the attack on your people. And this is the source of it all. It’s the first aspect, not a thirteenth. Remember that. But you have the Jishin back. They may be our last hope. Remember.” He dropped his hands and his gaze fixed on Duo’s chest.

“Er…”

“I’m sorry, Trowa, it appears we shouldn’t have left,” Wufei said softly.

“I disagree.” Duo put a hand on Quatre’s forehead - who didn’t even blink. “We’re going to need the Halls for this. I...I’m sorry, Quatre. I’m going to fix this if it’s the last thing I do.”

Quatre didn’t respond.

“He’s gone again,” Trowa said, turning back to the map. “He’ll talk for awhile, but then he’ll go off into his calculations once more. Wufei, can I ask you for your help?”

“Yes,” Wufei said without hesitation or question.

“I’ve set up a search pattern, and the sweepers are helping out, as are other nightwalkers, but if your Dragons could run reconnaissance too-“

“You’re looking for Heero?” Wufei asked in surprise.

“Yes.”

“I wouldn’t abandon a comrade,” Wufei said slowly, “but Heero is either dead, or he’s survived and is probably fine. Don’t you think we have more pressing matters?”

Trowa shrugged, the movement hurting his shoulders. He hadn’t slept much more than Quatre these past few days. “I don’t know what’s going on with Zero. But Quatre is insisting that finding Heero is vital. It seems a lot is hinging on it. If nothing else, it might calm him down if we can find him. So-“

“Hey you!” Wufei spun away from the table and addressed the Dragon hovering uncertainly a few feet away (they had all developed the habit of staying twenty nervous feet away from Quatre as if he were contagious). “Get whatever can fly in the air. Now!”

Trowa picked up a pencil, set the ruler and started drawing new search patterns.

His pencil slowed as it drew a hatch near a section in the middle of nowhere. A frown creased his brow.

“Wufei...can we leave in one of those ships? There’s one place in particular I want to check out myself.”

 

\---

 

“The lines of Center are...confused, though nothing anywhere suggests an imminent threat. But Heero never showed up as anything all that remarkable in them anyway.” Trowa had to speak loudly over the hum of the engine. Wufei had taken the pilot seat himself and directed Trowa to the co-pilot’s position. Duo had plopped himself down in a jump-seat behind them and dragged Quatre down with him. Hand on the healer’s forehead, eyes closed, he still was asking questions in quick, clinical tones. Trowa tiredly noted that Duo had changed in the past week. There was something less manic about him, more structured. His lines, what Trowa could force himself to look at through the ache of his overused senses, were spectacular, like a high level mage with strange anchors sinking into odd depths. Trowa felt some relief deep inside at having his allies, his comrades back. If only to share the worry and the burden, and the struggle to find a solution.

“I think I have some good news...?” Duo took off his hand and used it to scratch his own head. “I did some research on Zero back on Iwa No Hone. Knew it’d be useful once we got home.”

Trowa’s eyes had slid closed. Not to look at lines. He didn’t need to look at lines to know that Duo had said that Center was Home, not the planet of bones. Or that Wufei had looked over his shoulder and was listening attentively without any nasty cut at magic and mages, or anything other than trust that Duo could help. Well, at least someone’s life hasn’t gone to shit this past week, Trowa thought; it was without bitterness, because he did not have that trait in his character, because acceptance was part of his credo, and because he was so bone tired that he felt he could go to sleep right here in the co-pilot seat if he only wasn’t screaming inside every minute of the day.

“What good news?” he asked.

“I know it looks bad, but the arcane damage doesn’t seem that extensive. You say his lines haven’t changed much?”

“That’s right. His anchors are dangerously worn, he’s using Zero way too much, but so far he’s not lost his mind.”

“He hasn’t?” Wufei cleared his throat in a way that suggested he regretted saying that out loud. Quatre, for his part, stared fixedly at a safety harness on the other side of the cabin and could be alone in the world for all he heeded their conversation about him.

“He’s trying to do something. Achieve something. Most of Quatre is committed to it. We’re only seeing the edges.” Trowa felt distantly hollow. He’d made Quatre eat breakfast a few hours ago. He just now remembered he’d forgotten to eat himself.

“Yeah, but what? Is this the danger Juusan threatened us with?” Duo asked.

“It seems so. Though he didn’t seem bothered by it when Juusan went down. It came on a bit later. I don't know what triggered it.”

“The mirror...”

Trowa’s eyes flew open and he snapped his head around. “What? Don’t you start. What mirror?! He keeps talking about this mirror and Heero.”

“Wasn’t that piece of crap broken?” Wufei asked.

They’d arrived at their target area before Duo could fully explain the bit about the mirror. Not that Trowa could see how that fit into things, especially since the arcane apparatus had apparently been limited and not fully functional. It hadn’t shown anything revelatory about Heero, it seemed; it hadn’t shown him at all.

“We’re at the coordinates. At least there’s a lot of spots to land,” Wufei commented, eyes on the analyzer screens revealing hectare after hectare of bare dry land, flat, dry and lifeless other than the occasional sinkhole and rearing mesa. “Anywhere in particular?”

“Can you see a ravine?”

“I can see seven within ten clicks.”

“It’s one of the deeper ones. It has a bridge across it. Here, set me down. Once my feet touch the earth, I can figure out where it is.”

“You seriously think Heero walked back here on his own? This is where you picked him up, isn’t it?” Duo asked, leaning between their seats to aim a puzzled frown at the view outside the cockpit.

“That’s right.”

“Why would he come back here?” Wufei asked, giving the view outside an unimpressed glance.

“Why does Heero do anything?” Duo muttered, also looking around. “Tro? You okay?”

Senses that’d been strained to the breaking point this past week felt as raw as if they’d been grated, and now they twanged painfully the closer they got to the ground. “He’s here. Wufei, don’t land just yet, go about half a kilometer that way.”

The stretch of ground they eventually alighted on looked much the same as the last. But a hundred meters away, Trowa could see the old stone bridge over which he’d led a naked Heero many months ago. He looked around. His normal eye could see only barren dust - no birds, no insects whirring around, no signs of anything living anywhere. His moon-touched eye felt as if it were being slowly ripped out of its socket. They had definitely arrived.

 

\---

 

Duo gave the soil a suspicious look as soon as he put one foot off the ramp. “Whoah. Something way off here.”

“This way.” Trowa led Quatre by the arm, which slowed them down as the healer stumbled. Or maybe Trowa just didn’t want to get to where they were going, deep down. He wasn’t sure what was going to happen, the dusty dry air was pregnant with something dangerous, ugly… His protective instincts wanted him to bundle Quatre up into his arms and run in the opposite direction, but still he walked on, leading his lover towards the epicenter of that heavy stormy feeling.

Heero was on the exact same rock on which Trowa had found him so long ago, staring out over the ravine. But when they got within earshot, Heero stood up and, without looking at them, circled the rock so that he faced them, then knelt down in the dirt, hands on his knees.

“What...is he doing?” Duo asked, slowing. They were about thirty feet away now.

“We’re too late,” Quatre said coldly, like a computer. “Probability of non-event down to 0.38%. Initiate contact.”

“Er, what?”

“Heero!”

Quatre’s voice suddenly ringing out, clear as a bell, made Trowa and Duo jump. Wufei, for his part, ever the man of action, was striding towards Heero with a determined thump to his steps-

He gasped and stumbled back as if he’d walked right into something. “What-”

“Wufei?!” Duo was at his side in an instant, and blinked at nothing visible to the naked eye. “There- there’s some kind of- of arcane barrier. But it’s almost entirely inert, even I can barely- Never seen anything like it.”

“Heero, listen to me.” Quatre spoke measuredly, with none of the mania he’d evinced in the past week, none of the weakness that was making him sway slightly on his feet. “I know what you’re doing. I know you think you have to. But there has to be another solution.”

Heero didn’t respond. He wasn’t even looking at them, he was staring at the ground as if he was planning to murder it.

“Yes, I know,” Quatre said patiently.

Wufei and Duo glanced at each other and then at Quatre suspiciously. Trowa, though, could feel something twanging along very fine lines, gossamere as a thought; he could barely perceive them, but they carried meaning nonetheless.

“I...don’t know if I can,” Quatre said, then bit his lip, his tired face drawn.

“Er, Quatre…” Duo went quiet when Trowa waved him still.

“But we’re the ones doing it. I can see that now,” Quatre said. “I figured out that much, just from Juusan’s pattern of behavior. If we can figure out the danger, then surely we can stop it. We have to be able to stop it. You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to kill us all. Please, Heero.”

“Say what now?” Duo muttered.

“It’s too late.”

Heero spoke slowly. He didn’t look at any of them. Then, still down on one knee, he lifted his arms without a trace of hesitation, as if he was about to receive something heavy onto his back.

And he said: “It is done.”

A horrible non-light started pouring from him, searing all their eyes.

 

\---

Next Chapter: The End of All Days

Pretty much what it says on the tin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Awesome place to leave it, ain't it? *__*


	50. The End of All Days

For a staggering second that felt suspended in a sargasso sea of hours, the world was a negative of itself in Wufei’s perception: the sky slate-grey, the ground white, the light pouring out of the air above Heero’s raised arms blacker than an event horizon.

Then the Dragon was thrown to the ground. His hand hit solid dirt, five inches away from where a crack was working its way through the rock of the dry landscape. He tried to right himself- the earth beneath him shifted and shook. 

A wild glance showed him Duo and Trowa were also on the ground. But not Quatre, he stood there like an old sailor riding the waves by rote, his eyes fixed on Heero.

Duo staggered up to all fours and gaped at their friend as well.

“The first- not the thirteenth - one and only- the Source of All Things- _Fuck!_ ”

Wufei stared at him, aghast. Was Quatre’s brain-fever contagious?!

Duo reared up onto his knees and threw up his hands, face twisting into fury. “ _No!_ I just got my life back! I’m not letting this happen!”

The earth abruptly stopped its efforts to shake them into their component atoms. The light beaming from the air above Heero was no longer devouring their sanity, though it still felt like the universe had suddenly developed a crack. Wufei gasped as a horrible feeling of pressure, physical or psychic, made itself felt by its sudden absence. Wufei recognized Duo’s pose, his look of concentration, and the muting effect on the colors around him. Duo had thrown up some kind of arcane barrier to protect them from that alien energy signature. Or - no, more than that, Duo’s shield wasn’t a bubble around them, it was trying to strangle the light around Heero, it was trying to cage whatever was happening to protect the rest of creation from _it_.

“Q! Is this right?!” Duo shouted.The earth had stopped rumbling, there was only the sound of a wind picking up, blowing dust devils around while lightning cracked over their heads. The creeping living light writhing above Heero seemed to pulse and jet upwards like water out of a high pressure hose, until it sprinkled the clouds gathering overhead with squirming splashes of illumination. Duo was shouting as if he was in the middle of a battlefield, and Wufei didn’t have to guess that this was what the arcane plane looked like right at the moment. 

Quatre, still standing a few feet behind them, glanced around quickly. “Yes, you’re nearly there. Three extrapolations more, and go deeper - right there, into the arcane plane of Sorrows. There is a fractal there. Your dead can show you the way, the ones who found the key to defusing Juusan’s energy.”

“I’ll kick this guy’s ass too!” Duo snarled, fingers gripping thin air - around them, the dust devils suddenly fell with a sprinkling noise as if gravity, or possibly time, had done something odd to them. 

“You can’t beat him, Duo,” Quatre said measuredly.

“I’m not giving up!”

Quatre smiled faintly. “I know you won’t. Trowa, Wufei, you have your part to play as well. Don’t fail now. We are all of us depending on you.”

“Wh-what?” Wufei shared a confused look with Trowa, who’d picked himself up and was standing behind Quatre. 

“Isn’t that right, Heero?” Quatre called out. 

For a moment it seemed Heero would not answer. Now that the apocalyptic light shining over and around him was muted by Duo’s barrier, Wufei could see that his friend was bent almost double, as if the screaming warping of reality above him was something immensely heavy he was holding up in his outstretched arms, propping up with his bent spine. Muscles coiled in his arms and back, sweat was streaming down his face, twisted in a grimace of pain. He lifted his head as if that took an inordinate effort.

“I… have… a… mission…”

“I know. But that’s not all you have. Otherwise I’d have found you days ago,” Quatre said, crossing his arms. “I know, Heero, that you don’t think anyone can stop what’s about to happen. But deep down, a part of you is hoping we can.”

“No,” Heero bit out. 

“Yes. That’s the only way your actions make sense. That’s right, you heard me,” Quatre added, glancing up at the devouring light over Heero’s head and seeming to address it directly. “Your weapon, your herald of destruction here, is not behaving according to plan. He could have served as your conduit within any Source on Center, isn’t that correct? Including the one right under the Sanctuary. And he could have done it shortly after Juusan died. Juusan himself expected Heero to pull this trigger minutes after we won - even if he had to recover his strength, it should have been a matter of hours at the most. He didn’t have to wait a week. He didn’t have to walk back to where Trowa would think to look for him. And he certainly did not have to wait until his friends and allies showed up.”

Quatre stopped talking and silence followed - a silence highlighted rather than broken by rumblings of thunder overhead, and a weird static white noise at the cusp of Wufei’s hearing, as if the universe had become a malfunctioning radio receiver. 

“Will someone tell me _what is going on?!_ ” Wufei finally snapped. The Glaive was spitting in his hand. But- but he couldn’t use it against a comrade! Against the friend who had stood at his side and helped him defeat the Scourge.

“Don’t know for sure.” Duo’s words were harsh and bitten. “Heero is-... is pulling something through. Acting as a conduit.”

“Like Juusan tried to make me a conduit for his power?”

“Yes. No. You’re only human and Juusan was only the thirteenth aspect. This- Heero- he’s not human. It was staring us in the bloody face all along! Heero is the first - when Heero says he’s the One and Only - in the Old Tongue - he means he’s the fucking first aspect of the Source of All Things. Or he’s connected to it at any rate, and that’s what he’s pulling through now. The Source of All Things - that’s the beyond-dimensional energy that created our fucking _universe_. Juusan was nothing but a splinter of this thing, like- like the thirteenth copy of the same picture, all dulled. What Heero is pulling through - this is the stuff that pokes barely a fraction of itself out of Sources and creates fucking _Gods_ without even realizing it.”

“So it’s stronger than Juusan?” Wufei concluded, narrowing in on the essential. 

“Stronger,” Duo snorted. “Yeah, stronger. It’s Juusan squared. It’s Juusan to the power of ‘we’re utterly fucked’. And if this thing comes through- just part of its presence here- it’s like Juusan’s energy, it’s incompatible with our universe of matter. If any more of it comes through, it’s going to fucking kill everyone _everywhere_.” 

“What are you doing?” Wufei asked (he’d tagged the entire universe-ending problem with a label ‘bigger, badder than Juusan, kill it’ and was not going to worry further about the implications.)

“Converting its energy as it comes through, burning it off into light and heat.” Duo’s mouth twisted into a death grin as his gaze flickered upwards, high above their heads where the light shooting up from the crack now looked like the chimney of an active volcano. The air reeked of carbon, smoke and ozone. “Just like the Jishin had to do with Juusan, but that was a pillow fight, and this guy hits like a fucking tank. I… I’m not even keeping up with him. I’m barely slowing him down.”

“What can I do?”

“Dunno.”

“Nothing.”

Heero had been the one to say that. His eyes, glazing over in pain, fixed itself on Wufei’s face. 

“You… friend… leave this place… Take the guide… You can still rip Ether if you hurry. The disruption will take one of your lifetimes to reach you if you travel far enough.”

Wufei dismissed out of hand the notion of running away with his tail between his legs. Odd, though. Hadn’t Quatre just suggested Heero had waited for them before doing-... whatever this was? And now Heero wanted them to leave?

“Why are you doing this, Heero?” he asked.

A grimace was his only answer.

“He thinks he has a good reason. I guess he does, at that,” added Quatre when Wufei glanced back at him.

“What?! What reason?” 

“I… don’t know.” Quatre’s fair eyebrows drew together in pain and confusion, as if were trying to make out an equation scrawled on a chalkboard half a mile away. “I can glimpse it’s outline, but I don’t have all the answers. And what I do know, I don’t have time to explain to you, it would take hours. It’s all dark stars and marbles. You should know this, Wufei,” Quatre added a tad reproachfully. 

… Sure, right after he suffered a major concussion. Wufei had thought Quatre had gotten his grip back, but he’d forgotten the man had been belaboring under a psychotic breakdown this last week. 

Something hissed a few feet to his left, making Wufei jerk that way, The Glaive swinging around. A patch of ground nearby was cratered and smoking. As he watched, something zipped by into the ravine beyond Heero. Then a massive _whoomph_ echoed up, bouncing off the stone walls. Meteorites? Space debris? Cracks were running like crazy here and there, and Wufei wondered if this arcane battle royale wasn’t about to be interrupted on the prosaic material plane by the entire side of the ravine frittering away and dumping them into the gulley beyond. 

Then Shenlong flashed a warning. Wufei, attuned to his suit like a second skin, didn’t pause or hesitate, The Glaive immediately swung up and fired along the vectors on his HUD. And only then did he glance at his targeting scanner’s projected image, in time to see the massive chunk of sod and organic material - as large as a house - that’d been falling towards them vaporize and burst into chunks, falling far and wide beneath the spray of his weapon’s molten beam.

“Forget why. Talk about why later,” Duo bit out. He was one live wire of power and effort at Wufei’s side, the Dragon lay heavy odds the Jishin hadn’t even noticed the explosion a hundred meters above their heads, or the splatter and clatter of debris thudding to earth all around them. “What’s the plan?”

Silence. Between the five of them, at any rate. Somewhere close by, a strange grinding sound had started, as is the air was rubbing against the earth. Dust was blowing up all around them to a good dozen meters of height, though they seemed to be in a small oasis, spared the worst of the effects. 

“Quatre?” Duo prompted, his voice fraying.

Quatre slowly looked away from the hole in reality, growing visibly larger by the minute. “...Negotiations have broken down. They never really got started. The Source of All Things is too… alien. We had hard enough of a time understanding Immortals, this thing is beyond… beyond our comprehension, indeed, just like Juusan said when he was trying to warn us. Heero, I have to use you, I have to talk to you. This thing… it created you. Right here. Built you up atom by atom. Took its template from endless humans throughout Center, and made you flesh and blood so you could move away from the Source it used to construct you. You encapsulate a part of this _thing_ , you’re a Power similar to Juusan, but you are also more. Don’t you see?”

“I have a mission,” Heero repeated like an automaton. His lip was bloodied. He’d bitten through it. The man who’d taken Juusan’s blows and stood firm was now shaking with strain, pain roiling off him like a heatwave.

“I know,” said Quatre gently, patiently, as if speaking to a child. “I know it’s an important one too. But there has to be another way.” 

“There is not. It is _impossible_.” Heero was scowling at the ground again and had swayed forward a scant inch. Wufei’s gut informed him that what Heero was doing, dragging this whatever through, was taking every ounce of his power, and was going to kill him. Wufei found himself ripped in two, between the hope that Heero would stop and save himself, and the hope he’d fail and die sooner, before the damage, whatever it was, was truly done. The Glaive creaked beneath his tightening grip. Wufei still did not lower it, kept it pointing at the sky for further debris rather than bringing it down to bear on what all logic said was the real danger. The arcane shield that had bounced him back earlier had nothing to do with his decision to not attack his comrade, and he was honest enough to admit it to himself. 

“Hm. You say impossible like it’s a mathematical certainty,” Quatre mused. “But you have to see that surely that’s not the case. Nothing is truly impossible unless it defies the laws of physics - and even then we can use magic. Especially in this instance. Since sentient life is the cause of the imbalance, surely our intelligence can also-”

“No,” Heero snarled. Above him, the light had ripped open a little bit more of reality, and _something_ that looked like ribbons of mercury were trickling out. Instead of pooling on the ground around Heero, they sank straight through it as if the dirt he was kneeling in was an intangible illusion, as if the entire planet, the solar system, the galaxy and beyond were a paper mache backdrop and those tendrils were the only thing real in the entire realm of existence. Duo made a whimpering noise and gritted his teeth so hard Wufei could hear them creak. The light stopped growing abruptly, but still those tendrils of whatever kept oozing out of the crack in reality. 

Quatre watched everything with clinical detachment. Wufei could almost hear Zero’s gears spinning. “Heero, listen-”

“No. I have a mission,” Heero ground out.

Quatre’s shoulder sagged. But only for a few seconds. Then he looked up, and it was the old Quatre who was back, the empath, the kind healer. But a very determined one, with a look of holy purpose in his eyes.

“Then I guess I have a mission too. I’m not going to run away and live out the last few decades of humanity buried in a hole somewhere, _I_ am going to do something about it right now. I’ll prove to you that we’re not lost, that there is another way. You don’t think there is a solution, but I don’t believe that. I’ll _find_ it for you. Oh, please, don’t insult me with your concern,” he added, as if Heero had said something out loud - Wufei was way beyond understanding all the levels these conversations were being held on. “Because you know what? At least I’ll have tried. See you on the other side, Heero. Remember, the wheel turns.”

“What?!” Trowa said, reaching out-

-to have Quatre fall back into his arms, face white as chalk.

Trowa caught him up, turning almost as pale as his lover as he examined Quatre’s face. Shenlong, sensing its master’s concern, spared a few cycles of its AI and analyzers to flick over the healer. It reported that the lifeform was alive, but showed no signs of responsiveness, and theorized that the human was in a deep coma, and probably dying. 

“What the-”

“Quatre!” Duo twisted half around, but caught himself and faced front again, eyes wide with anxiety. “T-Trowa?! What’s going on?! Did- did Zero just- just _coopt_ him? I can’t feel his psyche anymore!”

Trowa didn’t answer, he was staring down at his lover. Wufei could not see his expression beneath the fall of his bangs. Zero? Coopt? Quatre had once mentioned the strain involved in running Zero from a human brain, but the spell was designed to help the mind cope with it, albeit with changes that Quatre, with a pinched look on his face, had refused to elaborate on. Zero shouldn’t run rampant over Quatre’s mind and body like that-

-...not unless it had been given permission to radically change its host and use him entirely for its own purposes. Given permission, or maybe even ordered to. _I’ll find the solution for you- at least I’ll have tried-_

Something went _crack_ nearby, pulling Wufei’s attention reluctantly away. As he watched, a huge rock on the other side of the ravine detached itself and floated upwards. It accelerated ponderously and seemed to be tumbling up towards where the light was exploding high over their heads, as if this were a fountain working in reverse. But then it wobbled and arced through the air. Wufei hissed and brought the Glaive around, but it tumbled beyond them, harmlessly flattening a portion of the badlands a hundred meters away from the Anstra. There were more cracking wrenching noises around and the ground was shaking again. The spaceship was undamaged. For now.

“Barton!” Wufei snapped. “Take Winner and get to the ship! I’ll send a pilot program through Shenlong. Go back to the Sanctuary-” Would the planetary shield - born of a Source - actually work on this thing? He couldn't see the sky well enough through the strange light to tell if the oil-slick shimmer was even still there, it certainly wasn’t doing much so far, but if it could be reinforced-

An eye on the sky, occasionally blasting away debris that looked like it might make it too close to Duo’s position, Wufei called up Han, his new second in command, aboard the largest ship they had left in orbit.

“Dragons! Battle stations! Protect the Sanctuary! Tell everyone who’s aboard the troop transport to evacuate the planet, though.” That ship was not heavily armed, it would not help with this catastrophe, and Wufei refused to see the last dozen members of his race, some of them with young children, die for nothing, defending what his gut was informing him was already a doomed planet.

“Yessir- um, is the Jishin with you? I can’t connect to him with his mecha’s comm.”

“He’s busy.” The AI of Duo’s comm would have recognized the life and death battle its owner was fighting, even if it could not assist with more than a psychic buffer, and would at least be rerouting calls to avoid distracting him.

“This man - G? The mage who helped us against the Scourge’s mentats, he’s yelling at everyone, trying to get a hold of the Jishin. He says there’s something wrong on the arcane planes.”

“I’m not surprised,” Wufei muttered, glancing at Duo. The latter’s arms were shaking, his face was white and tight with stress, but the ragged twist to his mouth was that of a man winding up to grab fate and punch it in the balls, come what may.

“Sir, he says-” 

There was a scuffle and then a new voice, the Warden G, started talking over the line in an agitated way.

“What is going on?! Wufei, the mystical planes- there’s something _there!_ ”

“Yes, it’s complicated, Duo’s fighting a battle against-” Heero- no- “against the, uh, Source of All Things.”

He lifted The Glaive in the direction of a distant object falling towards them - then realized it was a roil of smoke, but behaving in a way that implied it weighed as much as a large lead ball. Wufei threw up his other arm; the Fang shot up a wide swathe of energy shaped in a slope- the large swirling object collided with it and rebounded, enough to deviate its trajectory. It might not have hit them initially, but Wufei wasn’t going to take a chance.

He was well rewarded for his precaution a second later: when the ball of what looked like solidified smoke hit the desert ground, it shattered rock like a meteorite, sending molten rock spraying up, and creating a sinkhole half the size of the Sanctuary. The collapsing ground ran crazy with cracks, some forking towards Duo and Wufei like lightning about to strike and annihilate them - but then they stopped dead about five meters away. Wufei managed to swallow through a dry mouth. Dust was billowing all around.

“That… that’s not…” It was G. Wufei had thought the line had gone dead, but apparently the man had just been speechless.

“Duo is doing what he can to contain it. If you can think of anything, I can relay the information.”

“You can’t contain… that.” G was talking like a man in a dream. “He’s not containing it. It’s coming through.”

“Where?!” Wufei glanced down. The tendrils had stopped oozing out, the crack was not growing bigger-

“Everywhere. More specifically, through the arcane planes. There’s a… there’s a light growing there, deep within the heart of magic. I guess you can call it a light, it’s sort of glowy, but it-... mages who went into a trance to investigate, they, uh, they died instantly. And it’s growing. It’s-... I mean, this is the arcane plane, so it’s everywhere.”

...Just like the Soul Mind. But instead of affecting only the Jishin, this was going to work its way through that tenuous connection all humans and derived species shared. Mages would die first, they delved deep into that plane, but soon anyone who dreamed, or imagined, or thought, would also-... and just like the Soul Mind, geography and distance would not help with that. Every sentient being would be affected. Some, like Duo, might be able to shield themselves. For a time. But not forever.

“Sir!”

“I’m listening,” Wufei answered fatalistically. “What is it, Han?”

“I just heard from the troop carrier, sir! They- they can’t rip Ether!”

“They can’t… why?” 

“They don’t know! It’s - sir, we‘re getting communication via subspace radio - though it’s breaking up something awful. But sir, it’s not just our ships. Vessels as far away as Galatena are reporting malfunctions. Computational analysis won’t calculate trajectories, the computers just- just _spin_ , sir - like they can’t figure out how to navigate anymore. And- and someone from the shipyards at Balburdos - they sent a message, they tried ripping Ether on a short pre-calculated test run - they said the ship exploded, sir, only half reintegrated normal space. They say they ran analyses, but it doesn’t make sense, some kind of- of gravitational constant is- is shifting?”

“Constants don’t shift.” 

Wufei only realized he’d been the one to numbly mutter that when Duo at his side commented, voice strained: “I think I know why. I can’t stop it - I’m slowing it down - barely - but Wu, it’s doing something. Just it being here in our universe is doing something to- to every atom everywhere.” 

“Oh.”

“It’s- it’s not irreversible just yet, but I can’t-...” Duo didn’t finish that thought. The crack in reality wasn’t growing, but it wasn’t getting any smaller either. 

Wufei looked around. The badlands around them were already unrecognizable, a cratered smoking hellscape, but nothing was falling on their heads right this second. Wufei put Shenlong on alert for anything actually aiming at them, then sank down next to Duo, The Glaive at the ready. He extended Shenlong’s invisible wings of energy into an umbrella shape above them. It fritzed in the air, ready to vaporize anything that came down at them that The Glaive might miss. 

Unable to help any other way at present, he lent an ear to the worsening universal picture. More reports coming in, of calamities all over the planet. Seismic events everywhere, not correlating to any previously known faults. The ocean levels had suddenly fallen thirty feet, leading to collapses and landslides up and down the coasts of Center. Further afield, on other planets, frantic reports of ships no longer responding, mages going mad or dying as soon as they used magic… Then nothing for a minute. Wufei did not feel much hope, as he glanced at Duo’s face and the crack in the world. Sure enough, after a moment’s false respite. Han reported that the reason for the silence was the total collapse of the subspace communication net. And since mages were now no longer able to use the arcane planes to communicate either… Wufei glanced at his timer. Twenty nine minutes and twelve seconds since Heero had started… whatever it was he was doing, and already humanity had been divided and quite possibly conquered, and on the way to being eliminated.

“Too late to leave now,” Wufei ground out. He found himself talking to Heero. To his brother in arms, his _friend_.

“I know,” said Heero through gritted teeth.

“No ‘sorry for killing you all’, huh? Well-” Wufei couldn’t seem to get any anger up towards his one-time ally who was now trying to annihilate them. Mission? What mission was Heero talking about? Why was this happening?

A waft of heated air made him glance around. Forty meters away, part of the desert had apparently turned to glass. Wufei frowned at it, and glanced around quickly. He’d batted away a few debris falling from above… but now that he thought of it, the little section he and Duo were kneeling in was remarkably intact. This could not be a coincidence. It was like they were under a dome. Duo? He looked too strained, but he had to be the one protecting them, who else could it be?

“You should have left,” Heero said slowly, looking over Wufei’s shoulder.

Wufei registered movement there and glanced around. At the very same moment, Trowa sat down next to him. He was holding Quatre in his arms, and his face was impassive. 

“Trowa…” Duo’s voice was a pained croak. “I know it hurts, man, but you can’t- can’t stay here-”

‘Here’ is going to be everywhere soon, Wufei nearly pointed out, but saved his breath. Duo still had hope - or was just too stubborn to face facts, and Wufei would die before he took that away from him.

“I should have realized.”

The words were calm, almost contemplative; Trowa could be sitting in an armchair next to the fire rather than in the dead center of universal armageddon. He was looking down at Quatre and apparently addressing him.

“Remember the two of us, traveling in the vardo months ago…? The line I followed to find Heero, it felt so portentous. In the stories, such lines change history, change the world, but are followed only at great cost. And Center is a planet of stories. But you’re right, love. I would have done it anyway. And I know, I know. You would have too.”

Great, now Trowa had gone around the bend. Not that Wufei could blame him. He grimly pumped more energy into Shenlong’s energy wings as rocks, more magma than solid, sprinkled over them like a deadly hot hail, fallout from blasts further away. They’d already scorched the area around their invisible protection, and some had gotten through, but Wufei was damned if any would touch his friends, or disrupt Duo’s attempt to fight the unfightable. The mecha’s energy expenditure was growing, and Shenlong’s Gundanium seemed to have trouble cycling energy - ‘it’s affecting all atoms’, Duo had said. Shenlong was sending up increasingly frantic requests for diagnostics, and dire warnings that without a resolution to the fundamental issue, it could go critical. Wufei told Shenlong to shut up and bite the bullet. By the time his mecha got truly out of hand, either Duo would have found the solution to containing the Source of All Things, or he would be gone, crushed by the tainted light flooding the magical planes, like his entire race before him. If that happened, then Shenlong going nuclear was not a problem, it was perhaps the solution. A fission-driven blast at ground zero and right in the conduit’s teeth, that might stop Heero if nothing else could. 

“Center is a planet of stories.” Trowa had looked up from the motionless Quatre and was actually smiling at Wufei and Duo. “Just look at those two. Right? What a tale. It echoes through the ages: the children of ancestral enemies battling side by side, the deadly enemies who become lovers.”

“Don’t distract us,” Wufei bit out, and then wished he hadn’t. They were almost certainly going to die in a few minutes, and Trowa had become a close friend, that was not the way to say goodbye.

“This is a story too,” Trowa mused as if Wufei hadn’t said anything. “Center set it in motion and weaved us in. You as well, Heero. You’re a part of us. This...Source of All Things built you as its herald, its soldier. It gave you a mission. First to destroy Juusan and then destroy us, it seems. No wonder you came about with no emotions, no questions, no abilities other than to find the biggest baddest weapons, and fight and kill. That was all you were built to do. But to be strong enough to succeed, the Source of All Things had to leave you a human ability; the ability to learn and grow. And that means that ultimately it no longer controls you. That’s also a classic story; evil unwittingly creating the weapon of his own destruction.”

Heero didn’t appear to hear him at first, but then his eyes flickered towards the shaman, and his arms shook once before his stance turned to steel once more. 

“Because I know… I can see it now, the story all around us. Center set me on your line, Heero. Center and her raging river Reg ploughed Duo into our course. Duo’s little plots roped in Wufei to help, gave you Quatre to guide you. You’re channeling the ultimate power. How did Juusan say it? Beyond our comprehension. But he was an Immortal. He was a story meant to have no end, a single stanza frozen in time. We sentient beings, even the slow dreams of animals, we have more imagination in one wild night than Juusan had in his whole millenia-spanning lifetime. Center can dream too. She dreamed you could be more than a mere weapon, a conduit. Center took you in, because she knows you, Heero Yuy, she knows us all, she chose us for a purpose and she weaved her story out of it.”

His eyes focused on Duo. “You can relax your barriers, Duo, don’t kill yourself.”

“FUCK THAT!”

Wufei felt a surge of burning pride.

“He won’t kill us,” Trowa said reasonably.

“He’s about to kill _everybody_. Well, the big bad mega-Source is.”

“No, he won’t.”

“Why not?” asked Heero. 

“Yeah,” Wufei muttered, “that would have been my question- Duo?!”

Duo’s arms had sagged, so had his jaw, and a shiver ran through the funnel strangling the light from another dimension. It grew a bit brighter, the crack above Heero’s head widening. Shenlong, still trying to rally despite the very physics it was based on slipping out from beneath its feet, informed Wufei that the psychic interference in the air had dropped a fraction.

“Hang on there, heart,” Wufei growled, putting his arm around Duo’s shoulders and gripping tight. “We’re not done yet, we can still fight a bit more.”

“He asked- he asked a question,” Duo panted, eyes fixed on Heero burning in the non-light. 

So what? Oh yes, Heero didn’t ask anything as a rule. Not that the question had been promising.

“But why not?”

Heero’s face was twisted. If possible, the question seemed to be hurting him even more than the destructive energy he was conducting.

“But it’s them,” he bit out.

Oh, Wufei realized, he’s not even talking to us.

“I hate it when he does that,” Duo said, swaying with exhaustion and leaning more of his weight against Wufei. “Heero, buddy, if you’re going to kill us, do us the favor of-”

“Shut up, Duo,” Trowa said mildly. He was looking at Heero, unblinking, as if he knew exactly what was going on. Wufei rather envied him that.

“They live here! They fight and die here! It-” Heero caught himself, shuddering, but then his head came up pugnaciously as he addressed the air in front of his nose. “This reality doesn’t just belong to you.”

A slow blink from blue eyes that then narrowed aggressively.

“It doesn’t belong to you at all!”

The strange feeling of static snow just at the cusp of his hearing seemed to grow louder for a moment, though Wufei knew it was most likely his stress-induced imagination providing some optimistic proof that this was not a one-sided conversation by a Power gone completely mad.

“Yes, they’re going to die,” Heero raged, “but they’re still fighting - they are always fighting! _They_ defeated your aspect as much as I did.”

Silence.

“I know that was the point!” Heero shouted. “But-”

Duo’s barrier flickered and went out as the Jishin slumped against Wufei with a tired sigh. The light-... Wufei blinked hard, fortunately something was still protecting them from the full effect, because Wufei, hard-headed materialist that he was, was quite ready to believe a light like that could make a man mad just by looking at it. Duo must have kept at least a small barrier active. It had to be Duo… or… Wufei looked at Heero thoughtfully. Remembered how, even now, Heero had called him ‘friend’...

The crack in reality did not get any bigger despite Duo having let go of his stranglehold. But then again, neither did it disappear.

Heero, for his part, was still arguing with empty air. Because that dollop of lunacy was a thing Wufei had needed as a side order to the apocalypse, apparently. 

“I know! I know that- but why…?”

Even with whatever filter was in place, it was too hard to look at _that_. Wufei looked at Duo instead, judging the grey tinge beneath his eyes, the way he was shaking. If only there were a way to- to share this burden, this battle.

The silence stretched. Wufei looked around once more at Heero. The whole of life watched too, teetering on the edge of the abyss.

Slowly, so slowly, Heero nodded, eyes finally fixing on Wufei, on Duo, on Trowa and Quatre. 

“They… are gone already. They are already dead. The wheel turns.”

“Well fuck,” said Duo with a sigh. He lifted his arms again. “Here we go-”

The conduit flared - and then Heero screamed in agony as he forced himself to lean back. Slowly he ripped his arms out of their rigid pose and to his side, hunched over, breath rasping. And the intense feeling of power roiling from him dropped exponentially. Light collapsed all around him like something physical falling to the ground and shattering, large shards of glass that disappeared in flashes scoring the retina. 

Heero slowly got to his feet. He staggered once, then walked towards them, right through the spot where the shield had previously turned away Wufei. There he stopped and turned to look over his shoulder. 

“The wheel turns. These creatures are blinks, motes, they’ll be gone before you and I know it. But right now they are alive, they are fighting. If you want-... if you want to kill them… it won’t be through me.”

He swayed and leaned briefly forward, bracing himself against his knees, but then mulishly stood up straight once more. “They deserve to see the wheel turn, they deserve to see their descendants grow, they deserve to _try_. Quatre is _killing_ himself to find an answer to _your problem_ , he deserves to have a chance. Even if it’s almost certainly hopeless. They should never have had a chance of defeating Juusan in the first place, yet they did.

“So destroy us if you will, but I will not help you. I...will oppose you. I will fight you to the last. Like they do. Like they always will. Like _we_ always will. Now go away,” he added dismissively as the turned and made his way towards Wufei and Duo again. 

With a concussive noise like a bomb, the crack closed itself. The very sky above sizzled. Shenlong was filtering out ionized particles like crazy through its wings as dust began to settle. 

Then, at long last, there was a thunderous silence.

“Quatre?” Trowa said softly.

The air felt stretched and fragile. Dead quiet.

“It’s over, love. We have our chance.”

The vitrified desert nearby pinged as it cooled.

“I know. You can’t hear me, I know. It’s alright. I’m still here.” Trowa leaned forward until his forehead touched the golden locks. His face twisted, pain, raw grief. “It’s alright,” he whispered. “It’s alright.”

Duo slumped against Wufei. “Urg.”

“Come on, love.” Trowa stood up, looking down at Quatre in his arms. “Let’s go home.”

Heero followed the shaman at a few feet with determined step. It probably doesn’t begin to occur to him that Trowa won’t want to see him right now, Wufei thought blearily.

“Come on,” Heero snapped at them over his shoulder without breaking stride. “You follow as well.”

Wufei stared at Heero’s back “...Do we… er, talk to him about this at all? Why did he-...”

“...As far as I can make out, he’s the first aspect of the Source of All Things, built to order right here,” Duo muttered tiredly. “It’s not something it can do normally. It can’t make physical stuff, not something that can last for any length of time - not like energy constructs in Sources. But Heero is physical.”

“Did Quatre mention a herald?”

“Yeah. Apparently his, um, mission was to kill Juusan and then be a conduit for the Source of All Things and put the axe on all of us. For some reason.”

“He tried to kill us, then he saved our life- let’s just call it quits while we’re ahead, I don’t think I can fight him right now,” Wufei muttered. Shenlong was making the same pinging noises as the cooling rocks around them. He climbed to his feet and hoisted Duo up in his arms.

“Whoa!” Duo squawked. “I can fucking well walk!”

“Really.”

“I-” Duo squirmed, straightened and grabbed Wufei by the shoulder to prop himself up. “I can stay on my bloody feet at least.”

“Fine, fine.”

“Can we stop barely surviving cosmic cataclysms now? Just asking.” 

“Well, I think-”

They both tensed as Heero, up ahead, did a one eighty and came striding back towards them with the same martial stride.

The One and Only stopped a few feet away and stared at them - at them, not at the strange ripples still floating in the air near the lip of the ravine.

“Did I do the right thing?”

The two men stared at him. There was no indication that this was anything other than a straight question, but surely the answer had to be obvious…?

“Well… not wiping out humanity is definitely going to earn you brownie points in my book, yes,” Duo finally hazarded.

“Yes, humanity will survive. For awhile.” Heero looked around slowly and intently, at something that absorbed him and that neither of the two others could grasp. “But not forever. And now the universe itself will die.”

“...I am going to need a bit of a lie-down before I can tackle that,” Duo said, voice shaking behind the reflex sarcasm.

“Is there danger?” Wufei asked, his words etching the air, Shenlong whimpering as it dredged up more energy cycles from the Gundanium. Atomic cohesion had been regained at the eleventh hour, but its systems were considerably out of whack and struggling to cope with events. ”Is that _thing_ going to strike back at us another way? Where? When?”

“Danger? Yes,” Heero said bleakly. “Unless the guide can find our way, the death of this universe is inevitable.”

“How soon?” Wufei ground out, glancing back at the unsettled ground, hand gripping The Glaive. 

“It is hard to judge, it will now depend entirely on humanity.” Heero stared hard at each of them in turn as if apportioning blame. “Ten billion years at the utmost, but the point of no return could be reached as soon as five billion years from now.”

There was a short yet somehow sticky silence.

“Oh, so I do have time for a nap,” Duo ground out and staggered forward again.

“I’ll join you,” Wufei muttered, helping him along. “I’ll set my alarm.”

“Yeah, be sure you do, sounds like something we don’t want to miss.”

Heero turned. “Come on,” he said peremptorily, “we need to help.”

“Yeah. That we do,” said Duo, suddenly serious, eyes on Trowa’s distant back and the little flash of gold lying like a cold inanimate coin on his shoulder. 

 

\---

 

Next chapter: Path Finding 

When losing at chess, add extra pieces.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There will be further explanation as to who/what Heero, his mission and the Source of All Things are... in a later chapter! Right now, Quatre needs some help...


	51. Path Finding

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the unexpected break in posting. A sudden time crunch coupled with another fic I had nearly finished took up all my time. I should be back to my regular posting schedule of every other week until it's finished now, though, as I really want to get this long-belated puppy out the door ^__^ 
> 
> Thanks again to my SoaT test readers who reminded me not to forget a certain lil' fella!

“Duo?” 

Duo grunted but didn’t open his eyes, deep in concentration.

He could feel Trowa shift on the other side of the bed. “Go get some rest, Duo.”

“I’m fine.”

“You barely survived getting pounded by the Source of All Things less than a week ago.”

“I got nine lives.”

“That’s cats, not Jishin.”

“I’m fine,” Duo repeated, eyes still closed because it helped him concentrate on scanning the arcane paths of Quatre’s mind. And because if he opened his eyes, he would see Trowa’s face, and Duo wasn’t sure he could take that right now. Where did Trowa get off telling Duo the latter looked tired? Trowa looked like something that’d been dug up from a crypt. 

Quatre was laid out between them like a rift that would never heal. It’d been hard to believe Trowa could even work with the Jishin a few months ago, but they had Juusan breathing down their necks back then. Now...but Trowa just looked at Duo with tired acceptance that he was doing what he could to stop Zero using Quatre up like a battery for it's unknown calculation, to fix the damage _Duo had caused_ \- stop, Duo told himself, one more guilt trip wasn’t going to help. He gathered his tired and fractured concentration once more, and bullied his mind back into Quatre’s arcane landscape, one mental finger on the index of the Halls. The Soul Mind was working great now. Wonderful. Still didn’t miraculously produce a solution. All the sum total knowledge of his race could come up with was ‘well, that’s why we never really used Zero ourselves; because we weren’t crazy!’

“Maxie?”

“If everybody would stop interrupting me, I might get something done,” Duo snarled.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever. Go get something to eat and take a nap, kid. Or- yeah, even better: Scale-boy, drag this pain in the ass away and sit yourself on him - or in him - until he’s too tired to move for a day or two.”

Duo opened eyes that felt fuzzy and looked blearily towards the door. Wufei was leaning in at the jamb, eyes sharp. He glanced at Trowa, then gave Duo a ‘we need to talk’ jerk of the chin.

A deep sense of weariness flooded Duo, but he got to his feet. Wufei was dealing with the other side of this fuck-fest. Because the Source of All Things was still out there, and so was his First aspect, his herald or avatar or whatever, walking around looking somber and talking about the end of the universe. Wufei had volunteered to tackle that hard nut, leaving Duo to deal with Quatre. The last time they’d compared notes, neither of them were having any luck... 

“Sorry, Tro, I gotta-...” he made a vague gesture towards the door.

“Go ahead.” 

Trowa leaned back in his chair, eyes closed. It looked like he was going to grab a nap. If he did...that’d make leaving now okay.

Duo couldn't help one last look at the young man laid out on the bed. Quatre looked small right now, he looked like a kid. Or rather, like the corpse of one, not that Duo wanted to admit that even in the privacy of his devastated mind. Quatre was as white as the sheets beneath him, his chest barely lifting and falling, pulse slow. On one side of the bed was a medical unit that the warden O had provided, to keep tabs on his medical stats at a glance. On the other side, what looked like a ouija board that had collided with a dictionary; G’s special brand of spells that were magically infusing the healer with energy, and in essence keeping his body alive and unharmed despite the depth of the coma he was now in. It would even keep his muscles from wasting away, Duo had been informed, or blood clots from forming, or anything else dire from happening. Both science and magic combined could keep the young man alive indefinitely. Not that ‘indefinitely’ was a word anyone felt comfortable mentioning out loud anywhere in the Sanctuary and especially not in Trowa’s presence...

With a sigh he attempted to swallow, Duo held out his hand. Imp had taken to sitting right next to Quatre’s head, perched on his pillow, its little hand carding through golden locks. The animate was picking up on Duo’s concern, trying to help with its own brand of earth and healing magic. Or maybe it just wanted to be there; it had always seemed to have an affinity to Quatre over any other human in the Sanctuary. It’d happily stay where it was if Duo let it, but they should leave the lovers alone now. The few times Duo had been forced to take a rest, he’d cheated; he’d crept away to the Stoneheart Seat, a magical construct that allowed him to plunge more deeply and thoroughly into the Halls, looking for more clues. While he’d been perusing knowledge unseen since the Days of Power, he’d also felt whispers along the lines of his race’s greatest Sanctuary, like shivers along a spider’s web; soft words spoken. He did not think to eavesdrop on what Trowa was saying. He just knew he’d give the rest of his tattered soul to hear Quatre respond... 

Imp obediently clambered into Duo’s palm and let its master slip it into his pocket as Duo turned away. He thought he caught a glimpse of one green eye watching him as he left- but Trowa had said to go. 

Wufei was already several feet away, moving briskly towards the third hearthstone chamber. Their chamber. Duo had to run to catch up, bullying his body that was almost as tired as his mind. In his pocket, Imp sank deeper until it was out of sight, curled up into a stone ball. In the past week, the little golem had been so sunk into Duo’s reflected despondency that it didn’t even make faces at Wufei anymore. 

“Any luck on your end?”

Wufei glanced back. “What, with Heero? I’ve given up. He had a mission. He was supposed to defeat Juusan and then bring through the Source of All Things in order to either destroy the universe and humanity, or _save_ the universe by destroying humanity. Do you know how frustrating it is that he can’t see there’s a difference between those two things? Or that he doesn’t seem to know more than that?” Wufei crossed his arms over his chest and proceeded to look exceedingly grumpy. “This is the man who’s very core is to not ask questions - up until recently - so you can imagine he didn’t spend time gazing at his navel looking for answers. He was focused on the mission. Now… now he is trying to help. I know that in my gut. But any question I ask him bounces off those bloody blue eyes as if I’m reciting poetry to a computer. The one thing he said is that Quatre is trying to find a solution to all this, to the destruction of the universe, so I’m going to try to help with _that_ issue.”

Duo sighed. “It’s arcane, Wufei. It’s complex. I don’t know-...” if anyone can help…

Wufei stalked up to the rock formation above ‘their’ hearthstone chamber, and perched a hip on a magical ninth Stone of the Barrier of Dread, better known as the place Wufei liked to unpack his laptop and fiddle with it while eating lunch. Duo settled down on a low outcropping that was not part of the sanctuary, just a weather-worn lump of inert basalt, and tried not to think how akin he felt to it. 

“I have been talking to Svale, trying to get a picture of this whole mess,” Wufei announced crisply.

Duo winced. One more dose of blame, from the quarter he’d feel it from the most, the one person Duo had hoped wouldn’t be aware of just how badly he had hurt someone he cared about in his quest for revenge. “Yeah, it was all my fault.”

Wufei shrugged. “That’s a given. But the move was required, back then and even more so in hindsight. Winner is a warrior at heart. If he’d had Zero back then, if he'd seen the stakes and how essential it was, he would have gladly accepted the burden, sacrificing himself for - and this bears repeating - the entirety of humanity. Or the universe. Or both.” Wufei made a vague gesture, tossing both humanity and the universe dismissively over his shoulder. “Now, as a fellow warrior who stood beside him and benefited from his abilities, it behooves me to help.”

Duo looked at him with tired gratitude for his words, his understanding. “I…thanks.”

“I haven’t told you my idea yet,” Wufei said, looking briefly puzzled. Then he tossed gratitude off in the same direction as humanity and the universe. “So, your initial plan was not to weld Quatre to this thing, but to put it on Wing. Correct?”

Duo pinched the bridge of his nose. “No way am I inflicting this curse on Heero. Or on the First aspect of the Source of All Things. Either would be a bad idea.”

“Granted,” said Wu drily. “The crux here was that you were going to weld it to dragon scale like-”

_“No!”_ Duo was on his feet. “No way are you going to- to- _I won’t let you!”_

“I have no intention of losing my mind, Maxwell, simmer down. I don’t want to put this on any existing armor, but on a new set. Scale for Winner.”

Duo sat down again - more precisely, he slumped back down on the stone, manic energy swallowed by fatigue in one large bite. “…Oh. But I don’t have any more.”

“I believe I know where to find some.”

“Really?”

“Yes. After that, however…your Zero sounds like a program, but it’s actually a spell, so that bit I am not sure I can help you with much.” Wufei scowled, his usual go-to expression when he was worried. 

“Oh, that part I had figured out. Or rather I had a lead on it.” Duo sighed, cudgeling his tired thoughts into coherency. “Fen. He put Zero on Epyon. That was my blueprint, I was going to study how Fen had gotten it onto Epyon and then use that knowledge to glue the thing to Wing. Back before Quatre got infected with Zero directly, instead of remaining a passive carrier. Unfortunately, because of how things went down shortly after Q caught a bad case of Zero, I had to skedaddle, and I never got the chance to fully examine how Fen used Epyon and Zero together.”

Wufei didn’t say anything, but the crook of his eyebrow suggested he was picking up a great number of wild ifs and maybes in Duo’s plans. The Jishin shrugged tiredly.

“Yeah, I know. It was all such a desperate idea back then.” Back when Juusan loomed, larger than anything that could possibly be defeated. Before Duo knew his friends. Back when any sacrifice was acceptable. “Heck, who knows if scale can even help…?”

“It worked for Fen,” Wufei pointed out.

Duo blinked. “Yeah…of course. It even helped him stay sane. Not sure how though.”

“I am proposing to find the bastard and ask,” said Wufei menacingly. He had not liked the Phoenix, Duo remembered...

“Could we use Epyon?” Duo suggested. If they were going after the Phoenix with mayhem in mind, might as well aim for the prize.

“No. It should be new armor, shaped to the user.”

“I don’t know much about Dragon scale,” Duo admitted, fingering the comm device in his hair above the right ear. At first, he'd just used it like a radio. But in the one week of break he’d had between a world-ending catastrophe and a universe-destroying cataclysm, back on Iwa No Hone, Duo had toyed a bit with his little piece of mecha. Played with the psychic interface, with Wufei's help, plugged in the buffer - a little hanky compared to the arcane barriers he could muster, but even a little was better than nothing in a pinch, and a pinch was what they’d all been in this time last week, out in the desert. 

“Fortunately I do. I studied gundanium armor before I was called to Juusan’s service, and I worked on Shenlong a lot in my spare time” Wufei told him with his usual precise tone. “Scale is not something you just put on, it adapts to the user, it evolves to work with his nervous system. Mastering its controls is arduous.”

“Oh?” Duo tapped the metal - he was still looking for a cool name for it, because even if it was a little piece, if it belonged to the last of the Jishin and the first of the Jishin-Ryu, it was gonna have a name that struck fear into the hearts of his foes. “It only took me a couple of hours to persuade this piece of metal to cooperate - then again, I guess it’s just a piece.”

“Indeed. The way the main armor generates and manipulates energy fields is a whole other matter. Though...”

Duo focused his eyes. He’d been idly ‘poking’ his mecha with his mind. He didn’t need to have it flash information into his optic nerve, he could interface with it on the psychic level. It wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t know; it was suggesting that for the efficiency of his neural network, he should rest for a day or two. That, Duo had figured out (and promptly ignored) all by himself. He focused on Wufei now rather than on the redundant readout, since it was rare for his Dragon to trail off mid-sentence like that; Wufei usually talked like he walked, and he usually walked like he was marching into battle. 

“I have to admit you did adapt to it faster than I expected. I’ve wondered how you’d do with- never mind. Scale is rare- the real mechas, I mean, not just metal gilded with a bit of Gundanium. So rare that Dragons need to prove themselves in a series of tests and duels in order to be even considered for the honor. Scale is rare because the way it is built involves a slow and difficult self-evolving feedback loop to deal with integrating each Gundanium molecule into the whole. Once it gets to a certain stage, though, it cannot proceed without a higher control level, which is when it is worn for the first time, and the user’s mind and psyche has to integrate with it, harness it, fully grasp it at an instinctive level to become its matrix for development. Duo, are you listening?”

“Yes,” said Duo, because his ears were working and he had been focused on the entrancing lilt of Wufei’s precise, scholarly tones, which was technically ‘listening’, so this semi-lie got past the oath of Blood and Stone. He ordered his eyes to not glaze over and hoped there would not be a test later. 

“There is a period of adjustment, where the user has to push his ability to use it in order for the scale to develop. The more the scale develops, the more abilities the user can harness and the more it grows. But once shaped to the user - if the user fully links to it - then you can’t just break it off and bung it onto someone else. Not without a lot of reworking and virtually starting again from scratch - and even then the armor can be damaged and never work as well as before.”

That last bit Duo actually got. “Oh. So that’s why you were so pissed when Heero started really using it, that time you attacked him.”

“Precisely.”

“How come Wing worked for him, then? Wasn’t it someone else’s first?”

A flicker passed over Wufei’s face. “It was primed for its bearer, but it had never been worn yet. Wing was the culmination of intense research, the best scale we ever built. It would have been challenging to master. The Dragon it was destined for… was a perfectionist, she was still preparing for it when she died.”

“A woman, huh? Who was she? Someone kickass, I imagine.” His tired mind drifted over a picture of a female version of Wufei - all kinds of hot and wrong and yeah, oh boy, he was going to fall asleep, he was already half dreaming...

“Yes.” Wufei’s gaze fell to his arms crossed over his chest. “Her name was Meiran of the Long clan. She was my wife.”

Duo had never been more awake in his life. “Your _wife?!_ ”

“Hm. Initially, Wing was meant for me, but Meiran challenged me for it. We fought.”

“Er, you weren’t married at that stage yet, right?”

Wufei looked at him strangely. “Yes, we were. We were already eighteen at the time. Why?”

“…Er…okay, so she won? Your wife kicked your butt?” _Had_ he fallen asleep?

“No, I won.”

“Huh?”

“But… the duel showed me something.” Wufei’s gaze turned introspective, distant. “I had wanted Wing for pride. She wanted it for something greater. She wanted it to be a beacon for our entire race, a sign we could aspire to higher things than being mere mercenaries. I won the duel but lost the battle, if you will. Her mind and faith were stronger. I took Shenlong, which had originally been her destined scale, and she prepared for Wing.”

Duo knew they had a hundred more important things to deal with, but he couldn’t seem to let the subject drop. “Uh, you, uh, got any kids?” Stone and Bone, this was an actual question he was asking his actual-

“No,” Wufei answered straightforwardly. “Fortunately. Dragons start our families young, due to the needs of war and our clan, but she did not want to take time off for the in vitro process.”

“The what?”

“We weren’t going to have sex.”

Wufei said it like it was obvious. Duo could only make an uncertain noise that sounded vaguely like uuuur?

Wufei tisked and rolled his eyes. “I’m gay, Duo.”

This time the noise was whuurr?!

Wufei rolled his eyes even harder. “What do you think we’ve been doing these past few months?”

“But- but-”

“For Dragons, especially High Dragons, marriage is a match of the strong, to lead a clan. I loved her and admired her strength. Our children would have been great Dragons…” Wufei’s expression was briefly tinged by sadness, but he banished it with a shake of his head and then levelled a glance at Duo that suggested the latter’s full solid minute of reeling on his lump of stone was irritating the Dragon and not saying much about the Jishin’s higher brain functions.

“Uh. Okay. So marriage is only between men and women in your culture?”

“Oh no, that just happened to be that way,” Wufei said, looking surprised. “Relationships in a clan are… fluid, I suppose you can call it. We’re often separated into small groups for years on end, depending on deployment. Children born during those times - as I was - belong to the clan as much as to a mother or father who may or may not be married. Marriage, particularly among clan leaders, is the symbol of an alliance more than anything else.”

“...I am discovering entire new aspects of your culture here.”

“I gather the Jishin were different?”

Duo snorted rudely. “Dude, the Jishin didn’t marry at all, they’d never put up with having to live with anybody for any length of time, much less the four-and-a-bit centuries which is your average Jishin life expectancy. My people would occasionally shack up for a fortnight or until they were about to kill each other, and if genders and the stars aligned, a baby would pop out and be raised by whichever clan his spirit aligned with when he was presented to the Halls, a month after birth.”

“...So chaos, retrenchment and rampant individualism instead of an ordered system. Imagine my surprise.”

“Sorry we didn’t have rules for shacking up. How were the bathroom regulations in your clan? Tight?”

The loaded look that followed was the kind that usually lead to shenanigans inside their chamber rather than on top of it. But the shadow that had momentarily relinquished its hold sank its claws into Duo’s spirit again before he could suggest to Imp that the animate go take a nap at the hidden spring rather than in Duo’s pocket, and not come back for a couple of hours.

“Okay,” he said, depressed. “We might have armor, we might learn how to get Zero into it… but the damage to Quatre’s mind is done, it’s part of him now. We can’t get it out of him.”

“That was your initial plan, before he became an active carrier, but that is not what I’m aiming for now.”

“Oh?”

“I have to assume this Zero is like a program, even if it’s a spell. I’m deducing this from the way Winner and you all talk about it, and the stuff that spouts out of his mouth about probability and parameters. It uses the human mind as an interface and to manage its processing cycles. Now it’s hit a calculation that it can’t handle with those resources. You know what I do when that happens with one of Shenlong’s components?”

“Were you really hoping for an intelligent answer, you techno-goon?”

“Luddite.”

“Wired chimp- enough verbal footsie, what’s the answer?”

“I plug the piece into a laptop and give it access to more processing power. I give it an extra brain to use,” he added, obviously translating for Duo’s benefit.

“....hmmm. Think that could work?”

“Well, that’s the question. The scale is the ideal interface between mind and machine, and if it can carry a spell too-”

Duo’s brow wrinkled as what Wufei was saying raised weird echoes in the Halls of his dead, and also something else that someone had once-

“- then we can hopefully keep on sticking RAMs until the calculation can complete.” Wufei’s assuredness frittered away into a sigh. “The problem here is how damaged our friend is. If he’s unable to direct the repairs…”

“Ah, but Zero will if we give it more juice.” One of the spell’s functions was to try to keep its user from going stark raving mad. At least, mostly.

“Maybe. It’s worth a shot, but I don’t know how much, ah, volition Zero has, or if it was programmed properly to leave enough of itself free to handle the addition of RAM at a DOS level. If you Jishin programmed it like a bunch of whack-jobs, which I am ready to bet you did-”

“Oi.”

“-then it’ll just sit there, totally locked down and unable to free up enough CPU cycles to go and add more unless we reboot it in safemode and rebuild it up to use the new processing power.”

“...The last time I touched a computer was a year ago, and it was to hurl it at a techno-cabalist -”

“He wanted to steal me and build robots like me,” Imp chirped, briefly emerging from Duo’s pocket.

Wufei visibly shuddered. 

“- but even I know that reboot and rebuild does not sound healthy for Quatre,” Duo concluded slowly.

“That is an understatement. Which is why we shouldn’t mention any of this to Barton. I don’t want to give him false hope. It may not work, probably won’t since I wouldn’t trust a Jishin to program their way out of a paper bag, and if it doesn’t work of itself, well… I don’t see how to fix it.”

“Too late not to let me know,” said a threadbare voice off to one side. “And as for making it work… I have a suggestion.”

\---

 

Next Chapter: A game of twenty questions

So, Heero, what are some of your hobbies?

Fighting. Brooding. Destroying the universe.

...No more questions.


	52. A Game of Twenty Questions

A small member of an avian species flew past. Heero tracked it automatically, along with every furry mammal, insect and invertebrate crawling around the square kilometer and a half around him. There was no telling where danger might come from next. This was why he was here, at the top of the Sanctuary. Though Duo’s efforts had been more immediate, it was a fact that the Sanctuary’s spell had been part of what had hampered the Source of All Thing’s ability to come through. With Duo and the spell’s generator both here, attacking this place would be a logical first strike. 

He was aware his friend was coming, naturally, approaching with a power much greater than the earthworm currently digesting dirt ten centimeters from Heero’s left foot. 

Wufei gave Heero a slender nod of acknowledgment as he rounded the standing stone near the heart of the Sanctuary. Heero did not respond. Their eyes had met, Chang knew Heero had seen him, no further communication was required.

Then Duo appeared behind Wufei, eyes hot, set of the mouth pugnacious, and Heero sighed internally. Communication, and a lot of it, was going to occur whether required or not.

“Right. Can’t do anything about the other problem of finding Fen right this minute, so I’ll give you a go instead,” Duo said, plopping himself down on a leystone and giving Heero a penetrating stare. 

Heero turned to face Chang and Maxwell fully and waited. It sounded as if his friend had a plan for doing something. Finding Fen had been mentioned. It would do no good. But Heero decided spontaneously that if his friend left the precinct of the Sanctuary, he would go with him to insure he was safe. 

Self-delusion was one of the many, many human skills that Heero had not mastered, or was even aware of. So he acknowledged that he felt more towards his friend than merely the necessity of having him as a weapon at his side. Once upon a time, feelings had been mere atoms orbiting the massive sun that was The Mission. But The Mission was gone. The choice that had taken its place, to defend this universe he barely understood, did not have its magnitude. It left emotions to take up a larger space within Heero. And he let them, as he felt them tug him gently forward, linking him to this new purpose, to the universe he was now trying to save.

His friend would stay safe for the few short years he had left to live. Heero would see to that.

Maxwell had crossed his arms over his chest and proceeded to examine Heero minutely. He was silent for a full hundred heartbeats. Heero looked at him more closely in turn; he'd not had a chance to while accomplishing his mission last week. There was change there. Growth. A new stability. An even greater power. It had only been a few turns of the planet since Heero had seen Duo last, and the Jishin had changed so much in that short a time... 

Heero glanced from Maxwell to Chang, who was standing next to the seated Jishin, eyes going from him to Heero in a faintly concerned expression. Yes. That was how it was. His friend was truly impressive for a small temporary speck of life. One of Heero’s feelings twisted in his gut, the regret he always felt when he realized how extraordinary his friend was, and how very, very short-lived he would be.

“Wufei says you refuse to tell him much,” Duo abruptly said. “About the Source of All Things, and yourself. You know, the least you can do after trying to murder us along with the universe is cough up an explanation.”

Wufei shifted suddenly, eyes widening. Heero wasn’t sure why. Humans had a sense he himself did not possess; a sense that allowed them to carve twenty different meanings out of plain phonemes and syllables. Heero could only hear the words, and see the truth. Duo was probing him. Trying to dissect Heero and let the Jishin ghosts, now chained to his will, examine the pieces. 

But Heero was only made up of two or three pieces at most, and he’d already given them to his friend. No need to repeat himself. He remained silent.

Duo’s lips curled in aggression, in irritation. In anticipation, too. He looked tired and frustrated. A fight would clear his head. Heero felt a prickle of pleasure at the thought. 

“Quatre said you were, ah, built by the Source of All Things. Correct?” Wufei interposed quickly. 

Duo glanced up, eyes hooded. Wufei looked down at him.

Heero waited to see what would happen, a fight or talk. 

“Well?” Duo groused, turning back to Heero. Talk.

“Yes.”

“A monosyllable. We’re getting somewhere. At the speed of continental drift. I’m amazed you got as much out of him as you did after only a week, Wuffers.“

“Concentrate, Duo.”

“Fine. Are you human?” Duo asked. 

“No.”

“...What are you?”

“The one and only.”

“That’s another way of saying that you’re the First aspect of the Source of All Things. Right?”

...

“In the same way Juusan was a thirteenth aspect?”

...

“You are the First, right?!”

“I am the one and only.”

Duo rubbed his head as if feeling a sudden pain. “You managed this for a week? I’ve not been at it two minutes and I feel like screaming.”

“You’re tired,” Wufei said.

Heero watched with something like fascination. A fraction of time ago (a month, maybe, as humans saw it) those three small words would have started a fight. Now they made Duo slump a bit against the rock, his hand twitch to brush against Wufei’s thigh. This new state of stability was so very solid.

“I didn’t even think to ask him that,” Wufei admitted - his own hand had drifted to Duo’s shoulder. It was hidden by the turn of his body, Heero saw it in his movements though. “I was just trying to figure out if and when that Source creature will attack again, and if-...whose side he’ll be on when it does.”

“Hopefully ours,” Duo grumbled. 

“That was the only thing I definitely got out of him,” Wufei said with a sigh. “Go on.”

“Is there any point?”

“Yes. I think you’ll ask different questions than I did.”

“Fine. Heero, are you a mage?”

...

“Are you even remotely human?”

...

“Are you bigger than a breadbox?”

“Yes.”

Wufei coughed and turned away. He lifted his hand to his comm. “Going to see how Han is doing with those satellite sweeps.”

“Huh-uh.”

Duo stared at Heero unblinking. Heero remembered the way Duo had looked at him after he’d conducted Center’s energy, months ago. Duo had been awed, full of hope, proud of Heero’s success at getting the planetary shield cast in record time. Nobody had ever looked at him like that before. Back then Heero’s feelings had been so tiny, he had not recognized them. He wondered how he’d felt. It must have been a nice feeling, the faint curl of regret informed him. But the way Duo was looking at him now, as if he wanted into Heero’s skin, as if he wanted to rip him apart and _understand_ him… Heero tasted the feeling that flitted by. He didn’t mind this. It made him feel connected.

“You were built on a human template. But you’re not human.” The intelligent blue eyes were still fixed on his. “The Source of All Things did some monkeying around. As much as it could. But you’re not the product of a Source, you’re not raw energy. Are you...are you like Juusan? A self-contained energy construct that is powerful enough to leave its Source for awhile?”

Wufei, hand still poised over Shenlong’s comm unit, looked over his shoulder.

“No.”

“Oh?”

...

"Elaborate! How are you not like Juusan?"

“Juusan was the thirteenth aspect. I am the one and only.”

“...What’s the difference?”

Heero stared. The difference was that they were different. His friend asked so many questions, and so few of them made any sense or could be answered in words.

Duo’s lips flickered up in a feral smile. “Are you mortal?”

“No.”

Wufei turned around fully at that, staring. 

Duo had his hands clasped, chin resting on the linked fingers, unblinking eyes like gun barrels. “The Source of All Things built you. You are… part of this universe, built of its matter, yet somehow you… encapsulate some of that other energy. Explain the difference between you and Juusan.”

“He was the thirteenth aspect-”

“And you’re the one and only, but what does that _mean?”_

...

Duo’s eyes narrowed. “What can you do that Juusan could not?”

“I have-... I had a mission. Juusan was part of it.”

“Oh?”

“I was based on humans. I can grow. I can change. The guide told me that. He is right. Juusan could not grow. He was one purpose.”

“...You are something more,” Duo said in a way that even Heero noticed to be strange, eyes suddenly turned inwards.

“But in practical terms,” Wufei said, coming up to them. “Juusan was- was source energy, even if it seems impossible he could move away from his Source. You’re not. Right?”

“I am the one and -”

“We got that bit!” Duo bit out. Then his eyes narrowed. “I’m starting to… feel the shape of the answer. Juusan was one single energy pattern. That’s how strong the Source of All Things is, Wu. Juusan was like a one-line memo. It’s like you put a “Buy more milk” note on your fridge, and you’re so powerful that your grocery list can dominate the entire galaxy and cull the human race at a whim. No wonder he had to re-source himself, though. Source creations, even gods, are not even wisps of thought, they’re-... accidents. They can’t last more than a short time away from their point of origin as a result, in the same way light can’t go walkabout away from the lantern. Juusan was so powerful and structured, he could last millenia away from his origin. But Heero here… he is something more. He’s...more like a robot made of flesh. Like a puppet.”

Duo let that dangle there. Heero had been watching the lips move. He had known there would be a lot of talking. But words, when someone like Duo used them, were somehow magic. Not a spell as such. Heero knew spells. he could theoretically cast magic himself if he felt the need, not that he did. Magic was just moving the world around in a different way than using your hands. However, words like Duo’s...they built images in the air that other humans could understand, and bring out a million shards of meaning. 

It took a long time, however. Heero was sure there had to be a way that was more efficient, though he did not understand it well enough to suggest an alternative.

Oh, Duo was still talking. Heero ran the last few sentences through his perfect memory. It had been words that suggested Heero had no feelings - untrue - that he was a killer, a slave to the Source of All Things. Heero tuned out again.

“Duo,” Wufei said quietly.

Duo’s bangs appeared to be bristling, and his worn leathers were coiling. Heero perked up. Maybe there would be a fight after all.

“I don’t think he’s going to respond to baiting,” Duo said finally. “I don’t know how to get him to respond. Heero-...” 

And there it was. A sliver of what had been there before, a sense of tenuous hope, of connection. Heero stared, wondering if there was just a speck, or if it was like the top of a deep vein of...something.

“Just tell me...are you really on our side?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Oh. Good. Um.” Duo rubbed his forehead. “Do...do _you_ know what you are? _Do not say the one and only!”_

...

“I mean...you say you’re not human and you’re not a construct like Juusan...”

...

“You’re the one and only. I get it.”

Wufei stared at him. “You do?” 

“No, but I get why he can’t answer,” said Duo tiredly. “He might have been built human, but the Source of All Things didn’t have much of a template for how the human brain really works, I think, or else it could only build an imitation. It’s just...it’s like the entirety of the universe is a foreign language to him and he’s got a one-page dictionary. And most of that page relates to guns and stuff. I think...I think Trowa might get more out of him. Later. Assuming-...well, we’ll see. Tro’s always seemed to be able to follow him the best. So… to get Tro back on board, we need to help Quatre - which will help the universe too. And to do all _that_ we need to find Fen. Any luck on the orbit surveillance?”

“Orbital surveillance, and no. The Sweeper satellites have quartered the mountains, but have seen no trace of habitation. My men have been doing flybys, but we’re down to only three shuttles that can safely navigate Center’s interference, there’s only so much they can do. And Fen could be anywhere.”

“Damn it. Tro’s too tired to read lines. Those other nightwalkers that cropped up with S are doing their best, but they never met Fen. They say that makes it real hard to find him.”

The friend had turned away from Heero, was folded back on himself. Heero felt that odd pinch of feeling again. He wanted… more… The oddness of that caught him by surprise.

“I guess we can go back to Bird’s Cry and search ourselves. I can try to dig through the Halls, see if they can find anything more about the Phoenix, maybe figure out a tracking spell that might work on the critter...”

“The whole planet is still on high alert. Why don’t we send out a radio broadcast? He’s pretty remarkable. We can ask whoever has a CB to pass on the message.”

Duo stared at Wufei. “I would never have thought of that.”

“I notice you turn to dead people more readily than live ones.”

“Because they’re more helpful as a rule.”

“Everyone’s been shaken by what happened recently. They’re all looking to Howard and his Sweepers for direction and reassurance. If he asks the question, people will listen.”

“Yeah. ‘Hey, y’all, the fate of the universe hangs on us finding a tall blonde hottie called Fen, call Howard’s private line if you’-...er...what’s he doing?”

Wufei glanced over and stared at the finger Heero had lifted and was pointing off to their left.

“Heero?”

“What are you pointing at, bud?” Duo asked.

‘Bud.’ That was what he used to call Heero before the latter’s purpose had been revealed, Heero noted with an odd flicker of feeling. 

“Fen,” he answered. 

Wufei and Duo both surged to their feet and spun. Shenlong ratcheted. “Where?!”

Heero had the very, very faint notion that, had he been human, he’d have rolled his eyes at that point. He kept his finger extended in the right direction, surely the only answer needed to that simple question.

“Uh...I don’t see anything.”

Naturally. Human eyes and senses were not that good. 

The two stared at Heero, then at the direction he indicated. Duo took a step- Wufei held him back. 

“Heero- how far from here?”

That question made no sense, like so many others. Heero was, on a very small plane, aware of every atom in the universe. He knew where this collection was, but to explain it in terms of relative directions-

“If we walk, will it take us a few hours or days?” Duo suddenly asked. 

Clever. So clever. Heero felt as if Duo was trying to reach him like the guide sometimes did. Almost trying to teach him that magic of words that bound humans together…

“Yes,” he said, faintly pleased at being able to provide an answer. 

“Huh?” Duo whined.

Still so human, so limited... Heero had given him the answer. It would take hours or days, depending on how fast they moved and on obstacles Heero could not at present evaluate.

“I’ll get the spinnet,” Wufei said, ever practical and reliable. “That’ll be easier.”

 

\---

 

Heero continued to point out their destination, much to the pilot’s bemusement. It only took thirty minutes with jet propulsion, though Heero believed he, Wufei and Duo could have made it here almost as fast on foot and without having to fly. Heero did not like losing contact with the planet of Sources, and he really, really did not like these odd metal boxes humans required for transport.

“Something coming up on radar,” Wufei said tightly over his shoulder. “Get ready. Corzo, drop us off here, then stay clear. This creature is dangerous.”

“Yessir.”

“Oh please, Corzo here hovered a few feet away from Juusan. Fen ain’t anywhere near that class,” Duo snorted from behind Wufei. He’d refused to sit down as directed and was rubbernecking to get a better view out the cockpit.

“A good Dragon does not underestimate an adversary. We have never really faced off against Fen when he fully knew himself. Look, Duo, you should stay here.”

“What? No way.”

“He doesn’t like you much, remember?”

“He probably doesn’t like you either.”

“He won’t care,” Heero pointed out.

Both humans looked at him in surprise. These were the first words Heero had spoken since they’d boarded.

“You are only human. You can stay here or come. I will talk to him.” Heero pushed himself to his feet and strode towards the ramp descending towards the ground.

“Huh? Why?” Duo asked, trailing after him regardless. Wufei followed as well. 

Heero did not pay them any heed as he marched towards a distant figure. It seemed Fen had taken refuge in some old underground bunker, relic of a bygone war or other, Duo had theorized on their approach. But he’d come out when he’d heard the whine of engines and was now facing the approaching men.

“I am Heero Yuy,” Heero announced, walking right up to the creature.

Ice blue eyes narrowed.

“I saved your life,” Heero stated.

Behind him, Duo and Wufei shifted uneasily.

“Yes,” the Phoenix finally said. “Though I am ready to bet I was incidental. You were trying to save the planet from Juusan and I just happened to be on it.”

“Give me Epyon.”

“Oooh boy,” Duo muttered behind Heero. He and Wufei stiffened as if they expected an attack. When Fen didn’t react, Heero could almost feel the puzzlement radiating off his friend, who could not match thoughts with immortals.

Fen was quiet for a spell, then he asked: “Why?” 

Heero hadn’t quite figured that out, so he didn't say anything. 

Fen opened his mouth. Paused.

“You… are ridiculously young. You express yourself like a baby. I was like you a long, long time ago.” Fen’s long fingers reached absently for a small lump of stone beneath the clothes he wore, the accretions of his memories. 

“No.” 

Fen’s head tilted a little to one side, searching Heero’s face.

“I am the one and only. You are an accident of creation. We are nothing alike.”

Fen’s eyes narrowed as if the truth somehow inconvenienced him, another way he and Heero differed. “Hmf, at least I can wring sense out of a sentence. So I should just hand you Epyon?”

“Yes.”

“I could still need it.”

“I will bring it back.”

“... Very well then.”

Fen detached Epyon’s chest piece, and the other elements leaped away from him and magnetized to the armor. He handed it to Heero who passed it off to a gaping Duo in the same gesture.

Fen’s eyebrows twitched, but then he turned and walked away, back to the bunker.

“Just that easy?” Wufei sounded surprised.

“Hn.”

“Why...?”

Heero looked at him. 

Wufei seemed vaguely irritated as he rasped out: “Why did he just hand it over to you?”

“I asked for it.” 

“Uh…”

“I will bring it back.” Fen had his stone, he had no immediate need for Epyon… and he knew what would happen if Heero stopped asking and started _requesting_.

Wufei’s dark eyes fixed on the bunker door, now closed. “He didn’t seem that concerned, he didn’t ask when.”

“When does not matter.”

Heero walked after Duo, who had wandered off while examining Zero on Epyon, but Wufei stopped him, catching Heero by the arm.

“You… You really are immortal,” he said, staring at him as if he’d never seen Heero before.

“Yes. No.”

Wufei looked confused (and irritated, which was what usually happened when Wufei was confused.) “Which is it?”

“I will die if the Source of All Things comes through.”

“But otherwise you cannot be killed?”

Such weird questions. But something in those black eyes made him want to answer. To carve his own magic spell of words to connect their minds together.

“I can be killed by Juusan. But he is dead. I can be killed by a Power. But not the Phoenix, a real Power.”

Wufei blinked. “Are there any more out there?”

“No.”

“...Oh. So you’ll live until you’re killed or the universe dies.”

“No.”

Wufei looked at him, then his lips pressed thin and he said, “What do you mean? Heero, can you elaborate on all your cryptic monosyllables without us prompting you to?”

“If the Source of All Things destroys humanity and the universe, I will die. But if it ends without the Source of All Things, then I will…”

There was a silence of seventeen seconds duration. Finally Wufei gave him a sour look and bit out: “Yes? You will what?”

“There are no words for what will happen to me.”

Black eyes widened, though a human mind could not grasp the true horror of what Heero could clearly see. “What do you mean?”

Once more that odd urge to roll his eyes, however useless that gesture would prove. He’d just said there were no words!

The hand was still on his arm. “This is why you wanted to talk to Fen, you knew you could communicate with him. It’s why you knew he’d give you Epyon. Because you’re both immortal.”

“Yes. We are above humans. The wheel turns for you all the time, it is turning already. Not for us. We are above the wheel.”

“Yes. I guess you are. Far above us small mortals,” Wufei said slowly.

Heero’s nod was firm.

“It sounds lonely.”

An odd shiver ran through Heero and made him flinch.

“My apologies.” Wufei suddenly took his hand away from Heero’s arm and shook his head. “I am intruding on your feelings.” 

He turned away. Heero looked down suspiciously at his own arm, wondering why it felt as if Wufei was still holding him there. Or why the fading warmth of his fingers made the atmosphere feel colder than the temperature and humidity index warranted.

“Duo, have you found anything?”

“Well, it’d be ten times easier to figure this out with Q around to help, please gape at the irony.” Duo was scowling at the mecha in his hands, eyes and magical senses sweeping over the Zero integration. “You and I are going to have to bang heads together to figure this out. I can see Zero, but this piece of techno- um, this lovely bit of scale from your wonderful technology-enamored race is not something I’m familiar with.”

“You sound more insulting when you’re trying to be sweet than when you’re actually insulting.”

“Ah, I have taught him to pick up sarcasm. My work in this universe is done.” 

Heero watched the words weave around the friend, the same way bodies weaved together for sex, the way minds weaved together when the friend was deep in thought. 

This feeling right here, in his middle...it felt the same as that time Center had shown Heero a blinding moment of truth, of connection, and then left him adrift and alone again. 

But he wasn’t part of this. 

...Was he?

Questions were like weapons. Heero had learned that in final. They could be used to build worlds or destroy them. Heero handled this one carefully as he followed his friend back to the shuttle. 

 

\---

 

Next Chapter: Tea with Master Li

Featuring tea, plum cakes and gundanium mechas.


	53. Tea with Master Li

The Anstra, small ship that it was, still had to maneuver smartly in order to alight onto the torn-up landing pad. The rack and ruin of his planet had not changed an iota as far as a grim-faced Wufei could see. Was his information wrong? What if the man he was searching for was not here?

Hands settled on his shoulders, pressed gently.

Wufei glanced up, but couldn’t see Duo’s face from that angle. He suspected the gesture had been one of comfort, of solidarity. Wufei patted the fingers briskly in thanks for the sentiment, though it was not required. He had rarely landed on Jiachan, he’d spent most of his life in space where his race had thrived. These ruins were not significant, he’d been more depressed when they’d flown past the man o’ war _Liassom_ , hulled and drifting in vacuum near the planet’s fourth moon. But for Duo, this savaged world would bring back many bad memories.

“I don’t know-” The Anstra interrupted him with a sudden warning: not all the landing pad was ruined, there were carefully camouflaged and shielded turrets surrounding one of the buildings up ahead, and half of them were trained on the Anstra, targeting systems hot. At the same time, the FoF gave a discreet mutter as it exchanged a friendly handshake with a local system. Thank lady luck, then, his information had been accurate. “He’s here.”

The hands squeezed and then Duo leaned forward to look at the view screen. “Do you know where? This place looks huge.”

“It’s our- it was our capital, shipyards and main center of commerce,” Wufei said. “It’s approximately a thousand square kilometers from the foundries in the north to the Glory Arena in the south.”

“A _thousand_ -“

“But he’s in that building right over there, the secured metallurgical research center. It’s why I landed here and not at the yards.” Wufei’s fingers danced over keys, confirming the FoF signal. A message crackled across the encrypted channel and printed out on screen.

“ ‘What did you break this time?’ ” Duo read out. “What does he mean?”

“In-joke,” Wufei said dryly. “I pushed my tutorial armor pretty hard when I was young and I was constantly coming to him for assistance with the repairs. I was hoping to impress him with my abilities so he would accept me as his intern after my graduation. I was fourteen.”

He typed, ‘Nothing broken for once, but I have some interesting data for you. Have tea ready.’ Then he stood up. 

“Do I really have to stay here?” Duo muttered, throwing himself down into the co-pilot seat with a moue. 

“Yes. I don’t want you two to fight. We need his help. I explained.” Master Li was one of the old guard, and had spent most of his career fighting the Jishin during their Twilight retreat. He had lost many friends and family to their tricks and magic. Wufei had never met a Jishin before Duo, his own animosity towards their race had been cultivated during his apprenticeship with Master Li. He’d spent years working at the old warrior’s side in the workshop and labs to build new armor specifically designed to better link with the psyche and protect the user from the arcane.

“Yeah, yeah, no love for the Tricksters.” Duo looked glumly out the port hole.

“He’s old and set in his ways. I do not have the time or patience to convince him that you are no longer one of the people he spent a lifetime fighting, but a Dragon like himself.”

“Jishin-Ryu,” Duo corrected, but he no longer sounded anywhere near as grumpy. “Fine, I’ll stay here and continue our work.”

“I should be back in a few hours.”

_Our work._ Wufei glanced at Epyon before he exited the Anstra. The old scale was hooked up to two separate analysers, and was perched on a tripod inside a circle of chalk and small pebbles which warped the surrounding air with magic. It’d taken them three weeks to reach Jiachan even with the Anstra’s rapid Ether-ripping engine. Naturally Duo had come with Wufei so they could work on the combination of Zero and scale, rather than waste that time apart. It’d been… interesting, as the scorch mark on the Anstra’s ceiling could attest. Duo still had a temper, but it was more than that. He’d been run ragged for too long. Wufei was familiar with battle-fever like this, he’d seen it in his own clan. Duo had fought for six long years in unbearable conditions, an army of one facing impossible odds. It was a wonder he wasn’t a screaming basket-case, instead of being both functional and highly efficient. As a commander of men, Wufei understood and did not begrudge Duo’s inability to let go of that stress now; anger, nightmares and battle instincts could not be flipped off like a switch. 

Wufei had taken advantage of these weeks to enforce some rest and relaxation, as much as was possible in the Anstra’s limited space; a first step in undoing the massive damage Duo’s war had done to him. Meditation and Duo went together like a venerable antique vase and a keg of dynamite, so that was out. The Jishin had gotten bored after five minutes of listening to the rules to the game of boccha; Wufei still hadn’t found one of the beautifully carved stone pieces. It was a spaceship, an enclosed space, it’d turn up sooner or later…

Wufei had suggested virtual duels and challenges, since Duo’s comm piece allowed him to link to the Anstra’s onboard computer and play any game in the library. Duo had initially scoffed at the notion that some ‘silly little techno game’ could entertain a Jishin.

He’d never touched the puzzles or the meditative exercises, but his high score on Space Wars now rivaled Wufei’s. So much for silly little techno games. 

Wufei’s feet touched the soil of Jiachan. He stretched, breathed in fresh air (which, to him, never felt quite as reliable or pleasant as recycled). Then he made his way around potholes and debris towards a bunker that was an extension of the research center. 

The door to the bunker swished open before Wufei was halfway down the flight of steps. Master Li waited for him, framed by the door’s entrance hatch. 

“Master,” Wufei said as he came up to the venerable elder, stopping to clasp his hands together and bow.

Master Li made a quick gesture. “None of that, Wufei.”

Wufei looked up from his bow, puzzled.

Master Li’s expression was solemn. “You are the avenger of our race. The last High Dragon. The one who defeated the Scourge. If anyone should be bowing here, it should be me.”

Wufei opened his mouth, appalled at the very notion. “No, Master-”

“But I won’t. My back still hurts from my injuries at Duradu. And besides, I still remember when you were a snot-nosed brat who hooked the power cables the wrong way around on the HP voltmeter and blew out every component in it,” Master Li concluded dryly. “Come on in, Wufei.”

“Will you ever let me forget that?” Wufei said, battling down a smile as he stepped into the hallway and followed to the lab.

“No. Somebody has to insure you don’t get too big for your boots, boy.”

“Fair enough, though I-... fair enough.” Wufei decided not to inform Li that he already had someone in his life who could perform that function quite adequately. Better not get the old man asking questions.

The lab was not the same one in which Wufei had spent his best formative years, yet it could be its twin, its new owner imprinting his personality on it. No sign of the war zone outside here, everything was rigorously tagged, sorted and put away as if the entire workshop was expected to go airborne any moment, and be buffeted by flak immediately afterwards. Wufei counted five laptops (there were probably more tucked away in various drawers) tethered to work benches and linked via Ether networking to the huge databanks in the refrigerated room beyond. There was a small bunk bed off to one side, with a few backpacks that would contain personal effects and clothes. Wufei blamed the camp bed for the back pains more than the mage bolt that’d struck the old man over the planet of Duradu thirty years ago, though this reminder of a Twilight battle made him thankful once again that Duo was safely squirreled away.

“I’m glad you’re here,” said Wufei, who’d never been one for small talk. “I wasn’t sure the rumors were true.”

“I’m surprised you heard any rumors at all,” said the old man dryly as he walked off towards the tea corner. A pot he must have put on before heading towards the door was beginning to hiss. “I’ve only been here for three months, and I kept my existence well hidden before that in case the Scourge decided to send more forces after me.” Juusan had carefully eliminated every High Dragon other than Wufei, and also anybody who’d ever worked on that level of scale. Master Li’s name was undoubtedly high on that list.

“I hadn’t the faintest notion you’d survived the initial attack,” said Wufei, his throat tightening. “I was sure you’d died with the others. I went to the tech blocks-”

“Yes, I know what you found there. The Scourge was very thorough.” Master Li’s back was straight as a lance; he would not bend his head in sorrow, even though most of those men and women who’d died that day had been his friends and colleagues for decades. “I wasn’t in the lab when the attack occurred, though. I had a medical appointment that day, so I ended up in the evacuation shuttle that took the wounded and sick away from the planet.” 

“I see.” Thank the stars for that small mercy. As the center of a culture of warriors and mercenaries, Jiachan had always been ready for attack and had well defined evacuation plans in place at all times. No wonder Master Li had survived.

“I spent the following year being hunted by the Jusan’s underlings. It was tedious and I had to keep to myself for most of it. I didn’t know until recently that you had also survived, Wufei. Not until the death of the Scourge.”

“Oh…” 

“Fortunately it seems you did not need my help,” Master Li said, turning back to Wufei with a smile. “When I learned of his death, I finally poked my nose out of my hole. I hear you’ve started assembling the survivors of our race back on Center. I presume that is why you are here?”

“Yes, yes, I would like you to come to Center, of course, but I have another more urgent need first. I need a set of scale, the higher level the better. Weaponry is secondary, but it has to be able to handle the most advanced AI you have. There’s other requirements too. We have a suggestion for an initial build, and for the development routine we can package with it.” He cast his eyes over the workbenches. Most High Dragon scales had been destroyed in the Scourge’s attack, others pillaged by scavengers, but Wufei could see three pieces in various stages of construction right over there. Trust the old man to dive right back into his life’s work. 

“Hmm.” Master Li caressed his chin and looked at Wufei searchingly. When he spoke, however, it was not at all the question Wufei expected.

“You said, ‘we’ have a build. Who’s ‘we’? The man on your ship? Who is he?” 

Wufei tensed and nearly dropped the multi-tool he’d picked up and was idly examining. He stared wildly at Master Li, who gave him a gnomic look and then nodded fractionaly at a screen off to one side. Apparently the old warrior had gotten the landing pad’s analyzers back online. The Anstra’s provenance, FoF signal, engine readings and number of life signs were clear in their telemetry. 

“Oh, he’s a- a friend.”

“A friend with a stutter, interesting.”

Wufei gave the old man a pinched look in return for Li’s knowing one.

“Why don’t you invite him in?”

“He’s not house broken,” said Wufei shortly, glad that Duo wasn’t here. “He’s a magic user, and not a polite one,” he added, as Li started to move purposefully towards the door. “He helped me oppose Juusan, but he doesn’t get along with technos at the best of time, better leave him where he is.”

Fortunately Master Li seemed to accept that at face value with a mere shrug and a comment of: “War makes for strange bedfellows.”

“Indeed. So, scale?”

“Yes, yes. Who’s it for?”

“A warrior. One of the five of us who destroyed the Scourge. Then he was called upon to sacrifice his mind and soul for victory over an even greater threat. We’re hoping the scale will make him whole again.”

“In that case, the scale will be honored,” Master Li said simply. “AI over weaponry… hmm, I believe I have something I can work with here. Not these pieces, they are experimental. What kind of parameters are we talking about?”

“Here.” Wufei took a data chip from his pocket and put it down on the bench. “Here’s everything you need to know. We actually need-... it’s complex, it’s better if you go through the data. I’ll let you look through it, I’ll be back in an hour if you have any questions.”

Master Li paused as he reached out for the chip. “In an hour? Where are you going?”

“Northeast sector,” Wufei said succinctly. “There was a backup server for my clan there, research data I want to recover if I can, some things I need to do. I won’t be long.”

Master Li gave him a searching look, said, “I see,” and then, “Take your time.”

He gave Wufei hot water in a thermostatic container, two tea cups, the tea, and a packet of plum cakes that Wufei would never have touched himself, not having a sweet tooth.

But they were not for him. 

\---

 

All clans had areas in Jiachan they called home, even if they rarely spent any time there. The enclosure, surrounded by decorative stone walls painted red, centered around a small shrine to their ancestors, the venerable bricks and marble now mostly demolished. The main building held computer banks that connected via ether comm to their scattered vessels throughout their galaxy, an invisible skein of information, messages and chatter that bound them as a family as much as a clan. The compound contained sleeping quarters for the clan leaders and their families, barracks for the others, a sparring arena, racks for their war banners. The last, Wufei had taken with him when he’d returned to Jiachan, after recovering from his first confrontation with Juusan, back when he was searching for Wing. The rest he’d left as he found it, with one notable exception.

The sparring ring, before the steps of the demolished shrine, was no longer smooth beaten dirt. Seven mounds now broke its surface. Seven graves. Wufei had not found any other of his people’s bodies, they would have died elsewhere, or in space. After taking three minutes to verify that the computer bank, his flimsy excuse for coming here, was well and truly bricked, and useless, he spent some time cleaning the graves, removing weeds, straightening stone markers. He rooted around the shrine for a bit. Then he sat on the broken steps and prepared two cups of tea. He sipped one, put it down, took the other along with the plum cakes and a broken incense stick he’d found. He deposited the victuals near the headstone, planted and lit the incense, then went to stand before the grave marker and bowed.

“Hello, wife.”

She’d have looked up from her studies or her exercises at that point to scowl theatrically and say, “If you don’t know my name by now, you’re truly hopeless.”

A faint breeze ran through the sparring grounds, shook the few leaves on the antique cherry tree. It highlighted the silence, the lack of words from those who were no more.

“You are avenged,” Wufei said simply. “Juusan is dead.”

In the far past, the society that had given rise to the Dragons had not worshipped gods, but had believed in a living force in the universe which their dead rejoined in glory, to watch over their descendants. Wufei, however, like many others, was a rational atheist. He knew she was not here, she was not watching over him, she was not listening. She was dead, the body he’d found in the wreckage of the military control center - where she’d certainly fought to the last - was laid to rest here and was no more. He wanted to talk to her anyway. It was part of the process of letting go of the dead. 

“A large section of the mecha-like armor he was wearing broke off while we were fighting him. It’s not made of any material that we can identify, it’s part magic, stronger and denser than steel, and utterly non-corrosive as far as we can tell. The piece is about a eighty feet tall. It sank halfway into the ground, all the way to the bedrock, so it’s standing straight up like a stele. It will be there for a small eternity. Du-...someone-...Duo found a way of carving it with magic. He was going to write something rude on it - typical - but instead we wrote down the names of our dead. The entire clan is there. Your name was the first. You’re up near the top next to a Jishin named Solo- but he was a good sort, there is no dishonour being in his company. Hm, that probably sounds strange to you. See...ah...”

Wufei stared at the cherry tree for a minute. It had been scorched during the attack. The two branches still unmarked bore nothing more than a few leaves and a couple of withered up cherries.

He went to fetch his tea cup, and sat before the grave marker and the mound.

“Yes. So. I met someone.” He cleared his throat and found himself glancing around. “He’s the man I mentioned. Duo. Duo Maxwell. He-...ah, he’s a Jishin. Juusan missed one. He helped me. Without him, we would have all perished against the Scourge. He’s...strong. And complicated. I don’t know what you’d think of him. The only way you two possibly can be said to resemble each other is in the way you get your kicks casually insulting me. He means it just about as much as you did, at least now he does. Ah, we did not get along to start with, as you can imagine. Even when we got together - it felt like battle lust more than anything else, the kind of thing we’re always warning our cadets about. I never expected-... But a lot changed. A lot. I... I made him part of the clan. I imagine you’re rolling around in there now. But if you met him...he has a burning spirit the likes of which I have only ever met once before. He’s brilliant, dedicated. He made mistakes in the past- no, more exactly, he had to make some very hard choices, and now he’s trying to amend their outcome. That’s the reason we’re here. We’re working on something. This very bizarre type of scale, part techno, part magic. I know what you’d say about _that,_ but I bet you’d find the details fascinating. It’s necessary for someone, a friend. It’s complex…But we’ll get there. We… it turns out we work well together.”

That had not been a given. Sure, they fought side by side like clockwork when part of a team, but that was different than sitting down and brainstorming a techno-magical solution to a problem they could barely grasp. It had been helpful, in a way, to be locked together aboard the Anstra like that without any possible distractions - including that bloody stone creature, which apparently would suffer out in space and had thus been left to watch over Quatre. After those three weeks of working side by side, arguing, tempers flaring, snapping, but always ending up together in a bunk, bodies clashing and gripping and cleaving together before falling to sleep side by side… after those three weeks, Wufei knew two things for sure. One, they _would_ figure out how to get Zero and new scale to work together to help their friend. They could see the way forward already, and they were too stubborn to quit. And two, he and Duo would be together until the day they died. It was the only conclusion possible if they’d managed to work out something constructive, even phenomenal, and not kill each other before even leaving Center’s solar system.

“Let me tell you about our battle against Juusan. And the Source of All Things. And this new armor we’re building. I think even you will be impressed, wife. Now, after I left Jiachan-”

 

\---

It was a little over an hour later that Wufei made his way back on Master Li’s borrowed planet hopper. The old man would have had time to read the technical specs by now. In fact Wufei was surprised Li hadn’t called him to ask questions or yell at him for sending him project parameters that would only make sense if you lived in an insane asylum. Presumably his one time mentor was respecting Wufei’s time with his family.

Or there was another possible explanation…

Wufei’s blood ran cold as details leapt out at him before he’d even switched off the hopper’s engine. The Anstra’s ramp was extended as if someone had alighted, the bunker door was half open, and there was a loud noise - shouting?! - coming from inside. 

Shit!

Wufei shot off the planet hopper and ran towards the lab. He slammed through the door at top speed, rounded the corner-

\- and registered, pretty much as he took in the scene before him, that the loud noises he’d heard hadn’t been shouting or sounds of battle, but loud laughter.

“So Lord Felmar had to stay in the compost heap for two whole days while you Dragons tromped around in your loud metal boots and waved your lil’ analyzers around-”

“Didn’t those _idiots_ realize the heat from the decomposing matter might have hidden a life sign? I feel mortified on behalf of my fellow Dragons.” Master Li shook his head dramatically, making Duo sputter into the rice wine cup he’d been drinking.

“Not as mortified as we were when Felmar took the emergency portal back and teleported right into the council without bothering to wash off first. I mean, the dead choir gives him props for his clever escape and all, but shower, man! Shower!” 

Master Li laughed so much he almost choked on the smoke from the long stemmed pipe he’d been puffing at.

“Oh, oh,” Duo added, waving his cup around. “I have a message from another guy who was at Duradu, by the way, he says - oh, hi, Wufei - he says he remembers you, you fought well and he’d wish he’d been the one to kick your ass.”

“Hah, too late, and it wasn’t even Jishin who did it for me,” Master Li sniffed, “it was the bloody chief engineer aboard the Salmecca, our flagship. Mister ‘I am so important I can’t bother to check the shielding on minor ships’. I would have blasted that Lord of yours all the way back to Iwanohone if my shielding had held out.”

Duo snorted, tapping his forehead. “He begs to differ, but I’m not getting in the middle of that one.”

“You are wise for one so young and mouthy.”

“Yeah, yeah, keep talking, you only get snarky like this because you know Wufei would stop me retaliating.”

“I could still take you, Jishin punk - or Jishin-Ryu, as you so arrogantly call yourself. Don’t think battling Jusan to a standstill impresses me; the Scourge never learned how to fight dirty or to roundhouse kick. What are you doing over there by the door, boy?” he added, looking around. “Your boyfriend here answered some of my questions about your research parameters, but he’s woefully under-equipped in the brain department-”

“Oy.”

“- to understand Gundanium tech. Are you ready to get to work?”

“I suppose I am,” Wufei answered, having gathered his demeanor together again and slotted his jaw back in place. “ _If_ I can tear you two away from your war stories?”

“Yes, we can continue this later, since I suspect you will both be here a few days.” Master Li put down his pipe and walked stiffly towards the open laptop, displaying Wufei’s research data. “Interesting theory you have here, Wufei, very interesting.”

Wufei gauged his reaction carefully. “Did Duo explain why we need the parameters we laid out in the schematics?” he asked. That had been something he’d wanted to work up to, but he had a feeling the bloody Jishin had gone and let the cat out of the bag already.

“Yes, yes, you want to hook scale up to let its AI help handle a massive spell. If it does even half of what that young loud-mouth over there says it does, it will be a spectacular strategist tool.” Master Li’s eyes gleamed. Then he looked at Wufei a mite sardonically. “Were you worried I was going to make a fuss about spoiling perfectly good scale with magic?”

“Um. Yes. For starters, it goes against our regulations for scale development.” Putting magic on mechas had always been seen as a way of giving magic users a potential weakness they could exploit. It had been forbidden to develop much more than a psychic buffer, better in-built analyzers and passive defenses. 

“Hmf. I may be old, Wufei, but that does not mean I am not open to brand new ideas.” A complicated set of emotions fleeted by on the old man’s face, but were quickly banished. “As Dragons, if we are to survive now, we have to think differently, and allow some rules to change.”

“...Really?” Master Li had not been the most hidebound of researchers by any means, but that statement was still surprising.

“As it happens, I have been experimenting with something that could help you.” Master Li tapped the machine in which one piece of gundanium armor was slowly growing onto its metal exoskeleton. “Maybe I will provide you with my new designs after all, instead of using older armor. I’ve been working on the psychic interfaces some more - not in view of this kind of magic, but it can only help. More importantly, I have been developing the mental connections in a way that will be very helpful for your unconscious friend who’s never worn scale before.”

“What were you researching exactly?” Wufei asked, startled, as he glanced over the apparatus. 

“I wanted to see if I could refine the connection between man and machine, and make it less arduous to master scale. The process might take longer, but be less- don’t give me that look, boy. This is why my project suggestions were always shot down by the council,” Li said, addressing Duo over his shoulder. “They all had to go through rigorous training and duels and more training to master their armor, so their attitude was, why the hell make it easier for the next generation? They were just jealous. But with my ideas, not any goon can just put on armor and get it working, so get your hackles down, Wufei. I want to link the development programs to a human’s psyche at a deeper level. A young human’s. I want children to be able to wear and master this armor eventually, so that the gundanium and the child can grow together. It will take longer, but that’s alright, it takes a long time for gundanium to energize and reach its potential anyway. And the worthy will still make themselves known. Since we start with less gundanium, and let it grow, we can share it among more of our people, but at the end of the day, the effort, the focus, the willpower, the strength of mind and body will dictate how far their armor can grow, how great the warrior will be. This is not an equaliser. I was never able to explore this fully before - you can imagine how the research council blew a fuse - but now…”

“You’re enjoying a little pinch of freedom, hm?” Duo purred from one side. “Our own council would never have thought to restrain anybody’s research like that, by the way.”

“Yes, perhaps,” Master Li said with a wrinkled smile in return. “But I am still bound by the greatest rules of all: Excellence. Honor. Ethics. Right and wrong.”

“Oh yeah, you’re a Dragon alright,” Duo sighed, letting his head clonk back into his chair’s high back, then finishing his rice wine in one gulp. 

“Another of our credo is respect for one’s ancestors, whippersnapper. If you are truly a Jishin-Ryu, you will listen to me in awe. And silence. One or the other. I’d prefer the silence.”

“In my book, ‘ancestor’ usually means you’re dead already, so-”

“You think you can help my friend?” Wufei interrupted before they went off on a tangent again. 

“Yes.” Li pulled the laptop towards him and started scrolling through the information at top speed, splitting off different views and bookmarked passages and projecting them on other screens dotted around the room. “In regards to the magic part, we’ll have to rely on that snotty kid over there, but when it comes to hooking in the mecha to your comatose comrade, my research will be essential. I am interested in seeing it in action, actually, but I won’t be able to come with you right away. That piece in the Coil Reactor over there cannot be moved at this juncture.” Li would not leave a potentially powerful piece of armor here without his protection.

“Does it need you specifically to look after it?” Wufei walked over to the reactor, the size of a large crate, most of it radiation protection. Inside, tiny gundanium particles were infusing with energy and starting to harmonize. The process was delicate and took almost a year to complete, during which any movement, or splitting Ether in a ship, could undo all the work. “We have techs in our ranks who could fly back here and take over, with guards who can defend the lab in the meantime. You could rejoin us soon in that case.” If they could not get the armor working for Quatre right away, then Master Li’s help would be needed. Wufei didn’t like the idea of leaving his mentor here by himself anyway, even with the automated defenses the old man had cobbled back together. 

Master Li glanced at the far wall as if he could see the planet that had birthed their race, shattered and barren around them. He paused a moment, but then he shook his head and looked at Wufei, his eyes bright with anticipation.

“I am definitely curious to see how my armor will adapt to these changes you are planning. Hmm, it will take a few weeks for your men to arrive to take over for me, then I need to fly to Center myself - it will be a couple of months before my arrival. Can you wait that long?”

“No, Master Li, our friend is in a coma,” said Wufei with heavy patience. 

“He’s being kept alive and healthy, relatively speaking, but neither of us want to take the risk,” Duo said, serious now. “We’re not sure what Zero is doing to him. His condition is stable now, but that could change.”

Master Li looked vaguely disappointed, but then he made shooing motions with his hand. “Fine, fine, I will see my life’s work in practice another day, I’m sure. Now let me cogitate, since it turns out you’re in a hurry. I’ll put together the parameters you’ll need this afternoon, and run through some potential builds with you. We’ll review that today and tomorrow, make sure you have all you need, and then you can start putting it all together on your trip back. Wufei, do you have room in that tin box of yours for three pods?”

“Pods?” said Duo curiously, while Wufei said, “Wait, three? We don’t need three, we only need-”

“Incubation pods, are what we call them, they hold the armor pieces together and energized while the gundanium reconfigures itself according to new programming that the pod feeds to it,” Li informed Duo, “and I know what you need, boy, I’m not so senile that I cannot count,” Wufei was tartly informed. “But you would do well to have spare parts on this attempt. And if you do not need them, then you will still find my design and your ideas very valuable. Right?”

He gave Wufei and Duo a meaningful look. Wufei and Duo glanced at each other and then looked back at the old warrior, puzzled.

Master Li rolled his eyes. “I see over there a Dragon who has only the smallest piece of armor stuck to the side of his overly inflated head. What, you were going to leave your boyfriend like that? Sure, he’s a magic slinger, but you don’t think he can’t use more help keeping that lillywhite rear end of his safe in a firefight? Plus the work needed to get it working with his spirit armor will be invaluable in fine tuning how to integrate a Jishin spell and a Dragon mecha. You’ll find it helpful making that first attempt using on a conscious subject that can actually tell you if you’re on the right track or hitting a wall. Now, where did I put-” he disappeared into a storage area with a mutter.

Duo started to make a sarcastic comment, but paused when he saw the look on Wufei’s face. 

WUfei schooled his features into their usual haughty default, but the smile lingered. Duo hadn’t been the only one to be battle hardened, stuck in his one-man war… Wufei too had shuttered off parts of himself. But talking to Meiran, and hearing Master Li’s enthusiasm (carefully disguised in sarcasm)... it was reconnecting Wufei back to his past, and also opening up the future. Just from talking to his old mentor, Wufei suddenly knew, deep in his gut, that the Dragons would rise again. And they would be more than they were before. He’d never really spent that much time thinking about Duo’s fancy of being a ‘Jishin-Ryu’, really; he’d lacked the time, between all the crises, and maybe he’d lacked the mental flexibility too. But suddenly he really, really wanted to see what the future, fast arriving, would look like when it got here, bedecked in armor suited to his power, world-shattering magic dancing at the tips of his gloved and armored fingertips…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not sure when the next chapter will be out, since the holidays blew my spare time to bits (ironically). Either this chapter or the next can expect delays at any rate. But it's progressing, we're nearing the end zone ^___^


End file.
